This Is What Fifty Looks Like

Throughout this year of celebrating fifty, I’ve received a fair share of inverted compliments, those surprised if well-intentioned remarks “You look so young for your age,” or “You sure don’t look fifty” – a lingering emphasis on the word “look,” and I’ve thought myself remarkably clever for responding, “This is what fifty looks like.” I’ve since discovered myself trumped by a number of commanding women who lay claim to those words before me. Urban legends most credit Gloria Steinem with first use, who, when told by reporters on her 50^th birthday that she didn’t “… look fifty…,” responded, “This is what fifty looks like.” Others ascribe some turn of the phrase to Jane Fonda, Patti Scialfa, and Colette Dowling. I’m in good company.

Just a couple of days ago I struck up a conversation with Carol. Now, I don’t know Carol, and we’d never spoken before our paths crossed at the local auto-repair shop. I was getting the oil changed on a Ford Escort, and Carol was having a tune-up done on her “box truck.” That was the starting point – I’d never heard of a box truck before, and Carol was happy to describe her work. It turns out Carol had been driving truck for a little over eight years – semi for the most part and then, to keep her work closer to home and her 14-year-old daughter, the box-truck route she drives now.

Carol is a beautiful woman – tall, slender, with long, red hair and a comfortable confidence she wears like a pair of easy-fit Wranglers. I told her I’d been doing some thinking about what it “looks like” to be fifty, and she offered an answer of her own. “Hell,” she said, “it looks like whatever you want it to look like. This is what fifty-two looks like.” She stood and turned in a deliberate display of “Damn, I look good,” and we both laughed. I conceded, “You’re so right.”

Carol’s heading out to a “cowboy bar” this Friday and tells me I can come along if I want to. I plan on joining her there where, she assures me, "the line-dancing is the best in town." Before she left I told her about the weblog I was writing and that I thought I might write her in. She liked that idea but said she’d have to pass on the reading – “I don’t have a computer at home.”

No problem, Carol, I’ll give you a copy of the story on Friday.