Transitions and Transmissions

As if turning 40 was not enough of a life event this year, I just faced another one and confront a third this weekend. None of them are bad on their own, but putting them all together in a few months gives me a metaphorical gut punch.

Last month I went to a friend's wedding. He and his wife are twenty-five. They are the only twenty-somethings friends I have left. The next weekend I went to a cousin's wedding, her second. She is thirty-six, divorced, and has two kids. I really like her new husband, a real mensch. While I was sitting at the second wedding, I realized that the twenty-somethings' wedding the prior week was the last one I will go to that is a first marriage and a young marriage. Recently, all the weddings I've been to are friends' or relatives' second or third trips into matrimony. In a few years, I will be going to weddings for nieces' or my friends' kids. Ugh. Weddings are transitions for the participants, as are the types of weddings I go to.

This weekend I fly to my quasi-hometown, Billings, MT. My youngest niece is graduating from high school. I remember holding her when she was two weeks old. Now she is a beautiful young woman heading to college to study music (which is giving my depression-era parents heartburn). I chatted with her a few nights ago and she is excited, yet sort of melancholic that this part of her life is ending. Yet, more transitions. Her transition into adulthood and my transition into realizing that I could have kids the same age, and wont. I am not regretting the lack of offspring. I am just reflecting on the fact that a whole new generation is entering adulthood since I was their age.

While I was growing up and hitting milestones (confirmation, communion, drivers license, graduation, voting, getting married...) my dad would tell me, now you are a man. I did not really think much of his sentiments, nor do I think much of them now. Being a man is not having achieved or lived through those events that would have happened anyway. Being a man is my attitudes and beliefs that guide me through my life.

As I pass through these transitions, I think they are like the automatic transmission in my car. As I accelerate toward my final destination since my birth, life has been shifting through the gears. First gear does not have much range, but it sure has a lot of torque to get you going. Each gear after that loses some torque, but has greater range. I am not sure which gear I am in now, but I know with each shift I keep going faster toward the end. Being an automatic, I feel the shift, but am not in full control of it. I can not control the transitions in my life. These shifts happen.

Maybe my goal in life is not to try to down shift from fourth to first and recapture my youth. Mult-gear downshifts at high speeds can ruin transmissions and blow up engines. If I try to down shift to my late teens, I doubt my engine or knees could take it. I am trying to be content where I am and know that I can look in the rear view mirror to see where I've been, but I can't really turn around.

I guess a good point of going down the road of life at high speeds is that sex in that fast moving car is far more exciting because it takes an expert driver to do it. Ok, enough of all the fucking car metaphors.