The Age of Age

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Sometimes in the middle of the night, if I’m having a particularly hard time sleeping, I entertain myself by formulating the most ridiculous question I can think of.

Recently I was lying in bed staring at the blackness that I presumed to be the ceiling when I wondered, Did God give Adam operating instructions for Eve? I mean, besides the leave-and-cleave stuff that’s recorded in Genesis, were there any other tips?

I’d like to think after performing the first wedding on planet Earth, God put his arm around Adam, led him to a secluded corner of Eden and intoned in a low voice, “Now, I know I said it wasn’t good for a man to be alone, and I’m all for love and procreation and companionship and all that.  But there are a few things you should know.  Many things, actually.  Come to think of it, you should probably start writing this down.”

And then, in no order of importance, God would proceed to give Adam operating instructions, starting with, “No matter how badly she burns dinner, always tell her it was delicious.” And ending with, “Lastly – you should probably pass this along to the snake, too- never ask her how old she is.” And then Adam would start to ask why not, and God would interrupt him, putting up his hand and saying firmly, “Don’t ask why not. Just don’t do it.”

I think this part of the imaginary conversation occurred to me because I recently turned thirty and I have been thinking a lot about age.

As I laid there in the dark that night, I wondered why it seems to be such a universal female trait to instinctively protect one’s age from outsiders as though it were a state secret. And since there’s nothing new under the sun, it wouldn’t surprise me if Eve, the first woman on the planet, also shared this aversion to age.

What is it about growing older that makes us want to indefinitely postpone it? Is hiding our age a form of denial, a fear of facing the future?  Is it a fear of facing our mortality?

Unfortunately, I fell back asleep before arriving at any satisfactory answers.

—

Recently one of my friends flew out from Connecticut to visit me in Portland.  He is obsessed with cartography, and was astonished to discover that I’ve lived here for a year and a half and have yet to purchase a map.

On our way up to Mount Hood, we stopped at a gas station.  While I was getting fuel, he ran inside, ostensibly to buy drinks and snacks, but he returned to the car with a stack of maps.  There was a map of Portland, a map of Oregon, a map of the hiking trails around Mount Hood, and one of the Oregon coast.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” he said sheepishly, as if I’d caught him smoking crack in the men’s room.

It made me feel bad for Lewis and Clark, who had nothing to navigate Oregon by but the Columbia River.  And here we were, with a comprehensive atlas obtained from a tiny filling station in a town called ZigZag.

As we continued to drive towards the mountain, my friend gave me a geography lesson, which included a long soliloquy about the Continental Divide.  I kind of remembered the term from a middle school book report, but I was vague on the details.

“That’s the line that separated the North from the South during the Civil War, right?”

“No, that was the Mason-Dixon line.”

“Right.  So then it must be that fault line in California where all the earthquakes happen.”

“Nope. That’s the San Andreas Fault.”

Determined to redeem myself, I ventured a third guess.  “It’s the river that divides the continents of the U.S. and Mexico,” I declared confidently.

He grabbed his head with his hands, moaning as if I were inflicting physical pain.  “First of all, the Rio Grande is the river between the U.S. and Mexico,” he said.  “Second of all, the U.S. and Mexico are on the same continent.”

I shrugged a silent apology.

“The Continental Divide,” he articulated deliberately, while easing his hands away from his ears, “is the point at which rivers on a given continent begin to flow in the opposite direction.  So in the U.S., it’s the point at which rivers stop flowing towards the Atlantic Ocean and start flowing towards the Pacific.”

He went on for a good while longer about the details of these divides, but I can’t remember what he said because by that point I wasn’t really listening; I was busy having an epiphany.

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