Damien Galeone

The only gifts I remember getting as a kid were of the GI Joe realm or Castle Grayskull. What I remember more clearly is that my gifts were always wrapped in the Sunday comics, a thing which made the inside spoils all the more enjoyable to dig towards. There was a birthday at Angelo’s Italian Restaurant I seem to recall, maybe my eleventh or so. I remember thinking when I noticed the stained-glass lamps over the tables I have clearly made it.

When I was thirteen birthdays began to get a little more complicated. This was because I didn’t know what I wanted. When I was a child, it was much simpler. I wanted to go outside with my Gi Joes and play like the kids in the commercials. Then a bunch of birthdays after that were connected to trying to drink, drinking, and then wondering I drank.

Twenty-one was fine. But even that night – along with what Jagermeister tastes like on the way out – I knew it was all downhill after that.

Thirty? Pbbt. Forty? Who cares.

People kept claiming knowledge of some inspiration I would get. At thirty I’d be just so confident. At forty I would no longer care what other people think about me.

I have worn sweatpants to a bar unironically – before it was the cool thing to do. So I imaging that at some point, when I don’t know, I attained the gift of who gives a crap and have maintained a rather hands-off concern with what people thought of me.

I doubled down on this in my late forties when I became a lapdog guy and began carrying around a Shih tzu in a little bag. If I don’t have a little bag, I carry her across my chest and I talk to her – to be clear these are full-on, concrete, information-based conversations. I do not think she answers me, but I don’t seem like that if you see me.

So by the time fifty rolled around, I was more or less ready for the change in tone regarding birthdays. ‘You’ll be free, man!’ changed into ‘You’re in the old man club now, boy!’ and ‘You’re not gonna have a care in the world’ morphed into ‘Have you been to the doctor recently?’

I guess I have made it into some club where everyone gets to talk about health, liquid that gathers in the knee, my prostate, and the different kinds of cholesterol. This club invites us to discuss retirement plans and investment portfolios. We get to discuss, with some genuine urgency, the time we may get to retire. And if you graduate from this club, the next one you move up to is one where you get to eat creamed corn most of the time and where you might even get to join a community of your buddies and live in a little town of people as old as you.

I can still throw out my back if I think too hard about what I’m going to have for lunch tomorrow. But the not-give-a-crap thing is true, so it’s a pretty good trade-off for that and for all the doctors who now become part of your immediate lexicon. Oh well.