Older than Dirt at 38?

By: Samantha S. Daviss

This past weekend I was so blessed to get to see one of my college sorority sisters and spend some much needed time with her. She is one of a kind and I love her dearly, but she lives thousands of miles away in Africa, where she and her family are doing an admirable job for our society; but nonetheless, I miss her like there is no tomorrow. She is the kind of friend that completes my thoughts without me saying a word, she totally accepts my fowl mouth (in fact she makes mine look clean), and she has been one of my biggest fans through all my ups and downs in life.

Since she is gone so much, a group of us got together from college and let it be “her weekend”. So of course I had to give her a hard time about her choice of activities, and that was to going country western dancing; so I felt it was my duty to remind her that that was an activity we used to do together circa 1996, when we were still young and cute and in our very early 20s. However, it was her weekend.

My husband wasn’t nervous, but the thought of us at a country western bar made him a little uneasy, so I put him at ease by reminding him that they are all 40, and I am rubbing shoulders with it. Now none of us look just awful, but we certainly aren’t those 20-somethings out on the dance floor in tube tops. I’m thinking that a mom’s muffin top won’t look that appealing in a tube top, just my opinion. I painted a very clear picture for him that all will happen is we will stand around the little table, drinking beer and watching all the activities of the evening.

But then, my prediction changed, I was in fact asked to dance. I have to admit it was a lot of fun, I hadn’t done it in so long, almost a decade; that I had forgotten how much fun the spinning, the two stepping, the twirling all was. But I sure got a lot sweatier and out of breathe a lot faster than I had in the past. But it was an adventure, that’s for sure.

So in typical fashion the guy who had asked me to dance started to make the typical “dance floor small talk”; he asked if we came here a lot, and of course I laughed and responded with “no, we are old and between us all we have 9 kids”.

Kindly he tried to tell me I wasn’t old. “You’re not old, my dad comes here every Saturday night; and he’s really old.” He said smiling.

“Well good for him”, I responded. “How old is your dad?”

“Oh he’s older than dirt, he’s 33.”

In my head I am screaming….”What the…, this kid has no idea what he is even talking about! He doesn’t know what old is.” I could out run, out walk, out lift, out do him any day of the week (thanks to the nonstop activities of my boys)…so I politely asked him, “Did you say he was 33?”

“Yeah, why?” he asked inquisitively.

I just giggled and said, in typical Texas fashion, “Oh, sugar, first of all you don’t know what old is, and for the record I must be dead in your eyes…because I am brushing up on 39 years old.”

I wish I could tell y’all the profanity he released, but I will spare you. And about that moment the song ended (thank goodness, because the conversation between us sure did). Do you remember the turtle that got left spinning in the middle of the road from the dust of the speeding cars passing by?  

 Well, that is exactly what I felt like, the turtle spinning on her tail in the all the dust and speed from him sprinting off the dance floor.

I don’t think that young man could have left me in his dust any faster than he did on that dance floor. Not that I wanted him to stay, but I just stood there laughing at how badly I freaked him out with my “old age”, and thinking how one day he will be here soon, and realize he is decades away from getting “old”. Life is just now really starting to get good for me.

So remember next time you look in the mirror and feel like you are aging, at least you don’t need to go pick out your headstone, like I do apparently.