JeffVrabel.com

GateHouse – This past week I received an invitation to my 15th high school reunion, which was good, since it had been about nine minutes since someone reminded me that I was getting extremely old.

OK, yes, I’m speaking hyperbolically here, because I know that unless you are a gibbon monkey, 28 is not very old.

But I also know that I am not 28, I am 32, which is very near 50, and I just lied about my age to my readership (and hello again to my Mom, this guy Jason and the spammers who regularly comment on my blog – listen, guys, I know you’re not PayPal, so just knock it off).

And I know further that lying about how old you are is something you do when you’re old, or at least something you do when you’re feeling old. I’m feeling old partly because of this ridiculous invitation and partly because a ray of morning light recently glinted off my head in the mirror and revealed that large portions of my hair are turning an inarguably metallic shade of gray at the rate of apparently a full square inch of cranial real estate per day.

Can anyone tell me if this is normal? Because I’m feeling a little bit like when the “Gremlins” family woke up and all those pods were in their house. Like, jeez, where did those come from and how can anything organic happen that fast?

And I’m stuck now, because everyone’s noticed the gray, so if I were to go dye it or something ridiculous, I’d first of all end up looking like Donny Osmond, and second of all, well, you know what, the Donny Osmond thing is pretty much enough, actually.

Such age-related warnings are coming alarmingly fast these days. Last week, I injured one of my shoulders, which I use nearly every day, while strenuously reaching for an extremely elusive box of Pop-Tarts.

Also last week I fell asleep at about 9:30 p.m. one night, and enjoyed myself immensely. Also last week I installed Quicken and found that the bar-graph nature of its interface pleased me a great deal. Also last week I gave up on trying to listen to any new hip-hop music and found myself being oddly drawn to John Mayer. It goes on like this.

These sudden realizations — and by “realizations” I mean “ballroom dances with gnawing insecurity” — are made a little worse by my working primarily in a room full of extremely talented and precocious youngsters. These youngsters are young, which brings along a couple of very telling attendant problems with them, such as that they are not very old.

I work with a great many people who were born in the ’80s, which is a little bit unforgivable, including one friendly cherub who couldn’t identify Bruce Springsteen on sight and four or five who didn’t get an extremely hilarious “Star Wars” reference I made, because when “Star Wars” came out they were fetuses.

Oh, also several of them seem to equate turning 30 with, what’s the word, death, except slower, because I think their feeling is at least with death, it’s over reasonably fast. Turning 30, apparently, mostly damns you to several more decades of inevitable hideous terror, decreasing mental and physical function and an increased, if not obsessive, degree of interest in the Jumble. Which is, of course, patently untrue. The Jumble can be fun no matter how old you are.

OK, anyway, back to the reunion invitation (see how I’m going off on random tangents here without apparent cause? That is also a sign of advancing age. Can someone bring me a Tab?)

It is hard to imagine I’ll be attending this reunion, partly because I live very far away and partly because I don’t really know any of these people.

I also swore a long time ago that I would only attend any such reunions if I had passed certain life goals, such as be the starting second basemen for the Cubs or been for some reason aboard a spy submarine. None of these things have happened, so I think when reunion weekend comes around, I’ll just do something quiet and relaxing, like dye my hair.