Going to Get Baby Alejandro

Tomorrow, when I pause briefly with a Little Debbie Snack Cake to celebrate my 29th birthday, it will mark what I believe to be the first day of the last year of my youth.
I tell you this not because I’m hoping for a wave of presents, happy birthday spankings or pinches to grow some inches, but because talking to the faceless masses can sometimes be cathartic and I have a lot of catharting to do.
The problem of my aging came to light days before the start of 2005 when a group of my best friends from high school came for a visit.
There is an unwritten law that says when four guys from Indiana get together, a basketball game must commence within three hours or you might as well stay home and listen to Clay Aiken sing show tunes.
So we pumped up the basketball that had been stuffed in a closet behind the 1992 Chicago Bulls poster my wife won’t let me put up and headed out to the court.
We all remarked about the warm South Carolina temperatures and how it would have been difficult to play outside back in Middlebury, Ind., where the Amish buggies (actual buggies, not shopping carts) were plowing their way through the snow to get to Wal-Mart.
It was a beautiful day to be alive and on the basketball court, but after 30 minutes of 2-on-2, I wondered how much longer I’d be around to enjoy it. I was out of shape for sure, but it was much more than that.
None of us got off the ground like we did even just a couple of years ago when we met for three days of basketball in Minneapolis. We still hustled for loose balls, it just took a lot longer to finally track them down.
The only thing that seemed to remain from our glory days was our collective sense of humor, which was still firmly planted in high school hilarity.
After what seemed like four hours of non-stop basketball action, we headed home where my wife informed us it had been more like an hour and a half. Before I could hit the showers to ease my aching joints, that same wife grabbed my head for what I thought would be some sort of conciliatory kiss. Instead she pulled my head down far enough to stare directly at the crown, grabbed a hair and pulled.
“Ouch. What was that for?”
“You had a gray hair.”
Ouch.
I inspected that thing as close as I could without a microscope, and at best it was clear, not gray. Like some of the hairs that have sprouted recently in my unkempt beard, this was simply a case of a hair that had not yet made its way through the natural coloring process. It was a premature hair, not an old gray one ready for retirement.
I might stand a little firmer behind that claim if it weren’t for all the others signs of aging I’ve noticed recently.
I used to take great pleasure when just a couple of years ago I would have to show my driver’s license to get into an “R” rated movie, but now its like the high school kids working behind the ticket counter can sense my growing un-coolness and then taunt me by adding a “thank you, sir,” after I hand over my $8.25.
And since when did movie tickets cost $8.25? Back in my day, a movie cost four dollars and two bits.
The other day, I caught myself telling a youngster that I used to have to walk a quarter mile to the bus stop in 2 feet of snow when I was his age. It was a true story, but man, oh, man, did I sound like an old man.
Then there’s my hearing. The other day, that gray-hair-pulling wife of mine said, “We should make a Republican adopt a kid.”
It was a strange thing to just bring up in the middle of dinner, but I agreed. Republicans, Democrats and Independents should all adopt kids, if they have the means and a good heart.
Turns out that what she actually said was that we should go to the Dominican Republic and adopt a kid. A minor mistake, but one that could have severely hampered my plan to hold on to my youth as long as possible if we actually made that trip to Santo Domingo to pick up little baby Alejandro.