For as long as I can remember, I’ve assumed I would live to be one hundred years old. I’m not quite sure how I came up with that age. I’m not clairvoyant. No angel came to me in a dream and told me that I would live for a century. It’s just what it is. So imagine my surprise recently when I turned fifty and realized that I was HALFWAY THERE. “WTF?”, as my students would say. How the hell did that happen?!

Every birthday hits us differently. The big ones like “sweet sixteen” (longing for that first kiss), twenty-one (longing for that first legal drink) and thirty (longing to still be in our twenties) have the most impact. But for me, the one that really sucker-punched me in the gut was fifty. Oh, I tried not to make a bit deal out it. I wasn’t at all happy about it, but given that I had recently lost a friend and colleague my age to cancer, I figured I should be grateful I was still around. I gamely donned a smile and a bathing suit ( a modest one piece — bikinis are a thing of the past, which is a bummer) and headed off to Hawaii to celebrate with my hubby. But the whole time, I kept thinking, “I’m halfway there. Half of my life is over. And what have I learned? What have I done? And how am I going to do and learn and know all the things I want to in the second half?”

Which leads me to this blog. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do was write, but I somehow never got the words out of my head and onto paper (o.k. I’m dating myself with the “paper” comment.) A novel seems too daunting given that I’ve got a full-time job and the commute from hell, a hubby, a house, a dog, and ageing, ailing parents. But a blog, now that seems manageable. It’s like an email to myself. And maybe, if I’m lucky, others of you out there in the blogosphere will want to read it too. Maybe you’ll find something in your lives that you can relate to in my ramblings as I try to figure out what do with the second half of mine.