The Genius of an Age

Today was my wife’s birthday and at about 1 a.m. this morning I got a jolt of anxiety and sat up in bed. “I haven’t done enough!” I thought to myself.  “I’m a terrible husband!”  And then, like so many of these middle-of-the-night thoughts, I ignored it and let my sub-conscious work out the problem.

And really, there was no problem.  My wife is not materialistic. She was raised Mormon. Gawdy baubles were never her thing.  Her dad likes to repeat a quote from Gordon Hinkley “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” and he really lives that way.  It seems right and good.

When I ask my wife what she wants for her birthday, she always gives me big, impossible concepts.  “The health of the family.”  “The love of my children.” She might as well be saying “world peace” or “The end of Covid-19.”  So, I bought her wireless headphones on Amazon.com instead.  (They won’t come until next week, but it’s the thought that counts.)  I brought her coffee in bed.  I yelled at the kids to make her cards and they completed the task according to the letter, and not the spirit, of the law.  You can’t make kids care about things they don’t care about.  That’s a fact.  Their mother turning…thirty…means nothing to them.  It’s like the 19 in Covid.  They miss the nuances.

And yet, they measure their ages to the month.  It’s almost as if they’re counting down the arrival of some perfect age.  But there is no perfect age.  Or, if you prefer the inverse, every age is perfect.  It’s just a matter of knowing how to be perfect in that age.  There’s a genius to being ten and genius to being twenty and genius to every age.

I’m turning 46 next week.  I don’t feel like a genius.