D.L.: Getting older, one sneaky step at a time

And while all of those can be anticipated, if not welcome, sometimes the tiny steps can blindside you from unexpected directions.

The other day, for instance, my wife asked, “You want to hear something that will make you feel old?”

“If I want to hear something that will make me feel old, I can just listen to my joints creak when I get out of my recliner,” I retorted. I didn’t mean to be abrupt, but I still was feeling a little miffed at my daughter, who had the nerve to turn 50 recently.

“Well, this one will really get you,” she persisted. “I just read that Eminem’s daughter graduated from high school the other day.”

It was, I had to agree, definitely a jarring thought. It seems like only yesterday that Eminem represented the end of civilization as we knew it, spewing angry rap about killing people, including his mother. Learning that he now was a father in the middle of middle age and had passed his angry genes along to someone old enough to be a high school graduate was hard to digest.

But it was just one another one of those sneaky little steps.

Because, the evening before, I had watched a TV show set in South Carolina that involved two improbably good-looking attorneys who, judging by their youthful appearances, had passed their bar exams immediately after finishing seventh grade.

In one scene, the female attorney, who hailed from Chicago, began to present the kind of theatrical defense of her client you’d never see in a real courtroom, but which are the staple of television lawyer programs. In the midst of her dramatics, the gruff old judge interrupted her and summoned both attorneys to the bench.

“Young lady,” he said in his gruff old southern accent, “I don’t know how they do things up there in Chicago where you’re from, but down here we don’t go for that Perry Mason stuff.”

To which the improbably good-looking young attorney replied:

“Who’s Perry Mason?”

With that, I clicked off the remote and eased myself out of my recliner, doing my best to ignore the creaking sounds as I doddered off to bed.