Thirty

I turn 30 today. Aside from being, perhaps, a bit more pensive, I don't feel any different. I've heard tales from friends about weeping and gnashing of teeth, breakdowns, realizations of mortality, and the like. For me, 30 just seems to be a part of life. In a lot of ways I feel like I'm finally old enough to be doing some of the things I've been at for a while now, making pipes, having children, teaching. A very good friend of mine who regularly meets with high level political figures--members of the Obama administration for instance--remarked that, at 30, he now feels old enough to take himself as seriously as others in his profession always have.

I suppose I've had a single profound moment in the last couple of weeks. Sitting at my work table, leaning back in repose after having finished a particularly complex pipe, I looked down at my hands and noticed that they seem a bit weathered, somewhat rough. I have my dad's hands with long slender fingers and pronounced knuckles, a ten inch hand span from thumb to pinkie. When I was a boy I remember how his hands swallowed mine, and how they always felt so tender despite being calloused. They often had grease under the nails, or cuts from some minor mishap with a tool. They're now spotted from the sun, and his knuckles even more pronounced from age. He's still got the simple gold wedding band on his left ring finger--the exact same band I chose when I was married seven years ago. With those hands he spanked me somewhat less often, and hugged me far more often than I probably deserved. With those same hands he taught me how to use my own, to create with them what I can see in my mind's eye.



So the other day, I looked down at those hands and thought about the story that they tell--the faint dimpled scar from my wrist surgery, the indention in my ring finger from a wedding band I never remove, the fingernails kept impossibly short with almost religious fervor. In my thirty years, these hands have made hundreds of pipes, held grab-bars on subways from New York to Pragu, cut two umbilical cords, built hundred-thousand-dollar cars, cooked Thanksgiving dinner for fifty, shaped furniture for my wife and children, dragged down a number of, now, professional athletes, picked everything from strawberries to tobacco, plunged $100K+ cars into sharp turns, made the sign of the cross innumerable times, received an Ivy League degree, joyfully passed food and friendship to those less fortunate, built houses and barns, held ancient papyrus manuscripts, bandaged scraped knees, cut thousands of feet of steel, touched the Rosetta Stone, sewn everything from baby blankets to streetrod interiors, changed a million diapers, swallowed the hands of my own two little boys, and held the same beautiful girl for some thirteen years. I told that same beautiful girl today that I simply don't feel the need to have a midlife crisis. I've lead a full life at 30, and could not be more thankful for the things and the people, and the places that God has allowed these hands to touch. So I think I'll forestall any "midlife" shenanigans until I'm at least 60.