Forty-One

I’m forty-one years old today. Forty-one.

As milestones go, it’s a neglected year. You’ve seen dozens of homemade “Lordy, Lordy, look who’s forty!” signs over the years. Have you ever seen even one sign announcing someone was forty-one?

Thirty years ago today, I was eleven years old. My big birthday present was a General Electric monophonic cassette recorder — my first to use cassettes instead of those awkward spools of exposed brown tape. I have a photograph of myself — bright red hair, big glasses, white shirt, plaid pants — singing a song into the tiny black microphone.

Twenty years ago today, I became a legal adult. Strangely, that summer was the worst of my entire life. After having attended a local university for three years, I’d just completed my senior year at an out-of-state school. I’d spent the previous nine months living on my own, becoming happier, more confident, and more independent than ever.

The idea of getting a summer job and staying at school didn’t occur to me; instead, out of habit, I suppose, I came home for the summer. Big mistake.

I was used to setting my own hours and doing my own thing. This didn’t sit well with Mother, who became obsessed with asserting a level of authority and control that was unusual, even for her. She set bizarre curfews, implemented weird rules, and went out of her way to isolate me from local friends.

The day before my twenty-first birthday, I went shopping in Birmingham, estimating I’d be home “around three p.m.” When I got home just after four, Mother was livid. Didn’t I have any respect for my parents? Didn’t I have any sense of responsibility? In her frenzy, she had even called the Highway Patrol and reported me missing.

Weird, weird, weird. To this day, I call those three months The Black Summer. I left for graduate school the following fall. I never came home for the summer again.

Ten years ago today, I was thirty-one. I’d been with Clyde for three years. I’d left the confines of the fundamentalist church that had defined my social and professional life for the last two decades. I was starting a new career with SkyTel, an aggressive telecom company on the cutting edge of its industry. I was more myself, and more true to myself, than I had ever been in my life.

Today, I’m forty-one. Yesterday, I finished my sixth book; today, I start a seventh. I’ve recently signed the most lucrative book contract of my writing career. An idea for a novel worth finishing is slowly coming together in my head. I’m discovering a new, more spiritual side of myself: meditating, praying, becoming more interested in an inner life.

Best of all, I’m head-over-heels in love with the most wonderful man on earth, who makes this incredible life of mine possible. Clyde, I hope you’re with me at fifty-one, sixty-one, seventy-one, eighty-one, ninety-one, a hundred-and-one … and for whatever lies beyond.

I’m forty-one … and glad to be here.