“You’d have to be a clod to feel you’re young again. If you felt youthful, it would be a snap. Far from feeling youthful, you feel the poignancy of her limitless future as opposed to your own limited one, you feel even more than you ordinarily do the poignancy of every last grace that’s been lost. It’s like playing baseball with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. It isn’t that you feel twenty because you’re playing with them. You note the difference every second of the game.” — Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

Today is Clint Eastwood’s birthday. Somewhere in Carmel he has a big cake with eighty candles on it, and if he doesn’t, he’s at least eligible for it under the rules and conventions of birthday celebrations.

Today is also my birthday, and I can call myself, with precision, half Eastwood’s age. It doesn’t really impact me much. No matter which number on my personal odometer turned over, I still feel basically the same as I felt yesterday, and, truthfully, about the same as I’ve felt for the past dozen years or so. I know I’m not a kid anymore–I know that with certainty–but I’ve never felt that mythical sense of adulthood kick in. When I was a child, I looked at the adults around me, convinced that something special had happened to them along the line to elevate them to their status, that they had a moment in which they exhaled a deep breath and realized they were now mature. Goofy things were no longer amusing, and attention could be focused on the important matters in life. These weren’t especially serious people I was observing, but still they seemed to be adults in a way that was cryptic, almost mystifying to me.

I spend a lot of my time with people half my age. It’s a fallacy that doing that keeps a person young, but I’ll concede that I can often relate better to them than I can to new acquaintances in my own peer group. Maybe that represents a problematic unwillingness to grow up, but I hope it’s instead about instinctively hanging on to the best qualities of being that age: an engagement with the world, an openness to new ideas and experiences, a questing nature that leads inevitably to fresh discoveries.

I still remember well an incident from my college radio days that involved my friend, mentor and roommate, Uncle Rob Bob, taking a listener request. The person on the other end of the line asked to hear a Grateful Dead song that had been recorded around two decades earlier. Uncle Rob Bob hung up the phone and said, “I hope twenty years from now I’m not calling up the college radio station and requesting the same old Bob Mould song.” I’m not calling any radio stations these days, but I’m always pretty happy when a Bob Mould song (or a Husker Du song, for that matter) shuffles up on my iPod. But I’m equally glad when it’s something off the latest album from LCD Soundsystem or The National or Dead Weather. Maybe that’s where I am, somewhere where my past and present smear together in some crazy Jackson Pollock painting that is me. It’s not a bad place to be, and, for now anyway, the number of candles on my cake don’t change a thing about that.