Little Gray Pillbox

For some people, it's young, young, young, dead. James Dean famously lived his mantra, "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse," although how you're supposed to judge the aesthetics of your funeral when you're the guest of honor is a little beyond me or anyone else without an advanced degree in metaphysics or witchcraft. Some people live this without actually dying young. Were Keanu Reeves to depart us tomorrow, I think a lot of America would believe he's in his forties. You can hide a lot behind Botox. Just keep a close eye on how far it penetrates into your acting.

Other people are destined to look old forever. Walter Matthau could have done "Grumpy Old Men" in his mid-twenties. Peter Falk is just now catching up to the age he played in "The Princess Bride", but the chorus of "but he's too young to look so old!" never reached my ears. You can watch Steve Martin age on the covers of his old standup albums, hair turning within just a few years from black to jet white.

And so we come to my darling head. My friend Melanie plucked my first gray hair out of it at sixteen, in French class. I was kind of excited. Another person - Mike Myers I think - observed that Europe is a funny place, with young people pretending to be old and old people playing at being young. Proof: men utterly unqualified to wear Speedos subjecting everyone around them to the torture of caged cellulite. I always looked forward to growing up. Here, I was already growing old. Bonus!

Fast forward another sixteen years. What do I have to show for all this time? At this point, I expected my eyebrows to be gray, but all I really have to show for it is a set of gray racing stripes and a bunch of gray cowlicks at the crown of my head. Looking at it in the mirror, I observed to the woman shearing my head down to a bearable length tonight, it looked like a gray pillbox hat, or perhaps yarmulke. Happy Jewish New Year to me. Time to party like it's 5999. (It's 5576, I think.) Probably it will be 5576 on the Christian calendar before the last mousy brown hair falls out of my head, but, you know, near-immortality is a nice trade-off.

And anyway, now that I'm older I can start pining for the days when I was younger. I've already started with Transformers, comic books and calling my beautiful wife my "girlfriend" (she's so adorable). What next?