81 has come and gone

 Last week, I hit 81 yrs of age.

It reminds me of a bit I heard many a year in the past.  

When you are first born, your age is counted in months.   Baby is 6 months - or 3 months - or 8 months - 1 year and 6 months .....

Sometime during the elementary ages you start using single digits -  age 13 or 20 or 22 or ....

Then you get old, really old.  I'm not sure when that day comes, but no longer do you use single digits to express age, you go back to the months.   I am 94 and a half   or  86 and 3 months.

So you see, I turned 81 on the 4th.   That makes me 81 and 5 days old.    I was born at 12:05 a.m.   my mother once said.  I suppose I could list my age by years - days - hours.

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This is one of those stories of my youth.   Pardon me, this is a "Stone" of my youth.  We moved quite a lot as a child.  My father worked for Standard Oil of Indiana (now BP) in the oil exploration side.  We moved quite a bit in western Kansas and eventually Nebraska.  He ran a truck that measured underground man-made disturbances (dynamite, maybe)   He had a Logging Truck.   Meanwhile, my mother was a school teacher.

Originally, both parents were band directors after college.  She was the band director in Tecumseh, Okla when I was born.   Eventually that all ended.  We lived in Dodge City, Kansas twice.  During the first time I was about 5 yeas old.  Mom taught Kindergarten at one elementary school.  We lived in the attendance zone of a different elementary.  

Dodge city had a rule that you had to be 5 by November 1st in order to go to Kindergarten.

What would you do.   Hire a baby sitter or - yes, or - she took clorox and put a drop on the "4" on my birth certificate    - After it dried, she wrote in a "1."  At 4 years of age, I never knew.  For years, I thought my birthday was November 1st.

Suddenly I was 5.   I attended 1/2 day kindergarten at one elementary - traveled across town, climbed some stairs, and attended her 1/2 day class of kindergarten in the afternoon.  I'm sure I learned quite a lot that year.  Or not.

That put me as the youngest kid in my class for the rest of my life.  My wife is 6 weeks older than I .  And she was in a high school graduation class a year after mine.  

AND SO,  the stone ends.

(aside:  when I was in school, we were never allowed to write "and, so,"  It was one of the many rules of prose.)

Tomorrow is another day; and, I will be 81 and 6 days.

smile.

mtz