How to Feel Old

Spend Saturday working for The Man. Spend Sunday cleaning out a storage closet containing documents that go back to the 1920s, photos of your 23 year-old niece as a baby, notes of encouragement from your mom who's been dead for a decade, photos of and letters from and about the grandmother who died at age 26....and a 1999 Wallace and Gromit calendar. Tell your six year-old that you can't re-use a calendar, then eat your words. 2010 features the same dates on the same days of the week as 1999, including Easter.

See notations from 1999 that might as well be ancient Hittite for all the present meaning they contain. Remember the April of that year, when you finally told the deadbeat husband to remove himself, and he did. (And the April four years after that, when the present non-deadbeat husband joined you to welcome the boy who's now six.) See the notes from September 8, 1999: "51 lbs/tomatoes." And from the 12th: "6 lbs raspberries." The raspberries are long gone. The will to grow enough plants to produce a 51-pound, one-day harvest of tomatoes has long since morphed into motherhood and myriad other preoccupations.

Shit. What a way to spend the weekend.