Matamua Arts Photo Blog

Matamua Arts turns 40 today …the Artist mind-you, not the company. Last night I sat outside on my front porch at roughly ten to midnight with my two cats—my lady sleeping soundly in the bedroom—and together we contemplated the last passing minutes of my thirties. Okay maybe it was just me.

Funny, all those thirty-something B-days gone by and I never much cared about my age. Funny, because now I care, maybe not so much about the fact of turning 40, but about all those thirty-something B-days gone forever. No more left; discontinued by the manufacturer. And to think quite a few of them passed without any fanfare at all—by decree. I mean, I flat out refused to make a big deal of it. No presents. No cake. I was going to be thirty-six forever! I remember declaring this to the world. Why 36 and not 35 or 34, I don’t know. It’s not like I didn’t feel the same at 34. No matter. With all this grey hair in my beard, I’d have a difficult time passing for 36 now anyway, much less 35 or 34.

As I sat out there under the stars with time running out, I decided I would spend the last few seconds of my thirties trying to remember what I was doing on this night ten years earlier. I drew a blank. Oh, the larger details came to mind, like where I was living and where I was working. But curiously, no lasting memory of what I was doing the night my twenties left me.

Why it should be so important now and not then, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s because going from twenty-nine to thirty is not nearly as significant as going from thirty-nine to forty. No doubt on this night, ten years ago, I still felt like I had my whole life ahead of me; still felt like I was going to live forever—like I was indestructible!

Here at the forty-year mark, however, things are a bit more in focus and a bit more realistic, and decidedly less indestructible. I still feel like I have my whole life in front of me. No, that’s not it. Maybe it’s that I have the whole rest of my life in front of me. Yea, that’s it. Except this time around there are no tickertape parades, no confetti falling from the sky. This time around the mood is decidedly more maudlin. My thirties are gone; tomorrow, first day of the downward slide.

Or maybe that’s just how I feel now, now as the thirties-clock is about to wind down. Maybe in a day or two I’ll go back to feeling like I did when I was 36. Oh, to be 36 again. To be 30 ANYTHING, again. …Actually, if the truth be known, I’d settle for 39. That was an awfully good vintage.

Well, at least when I’m fifty I’ll have no problem remembering what I was doing when I turned forty. Thanks to this blog entry it’s documented for all time: I was sitting on my front porch with my two cats writing about what it must have been like to be thirty.

Getting back to sitting on the porch…

I purposely sat out there without a watch. I was going to pay close attention instead for the slightest physiological changes in my body to alert me to the changeover. Nothing happened though. No dizziness or nausea, all systems normal. When I peaked back inside at the clock I saw that I had already been 40 for a good two minutes.

It was quite painless.