In his column today, Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated looks at the end of the line: 44
This is the number at which even the greatest athletes have to hang 'em up and make room for the next generation.
Rushin makes a pretty compelling case against athletese and after that... he moves on:
It isn't only athletes who hang it up at 44. Sedentary artists, faced with the impossible tasking of trumping their own achievements, have also left the stage at that age. Gary Larson stopped drawing "The Far Side" at 44. Billie Holiday retired from life at that age, as did F. Scott Fitzgerald, for whom there really was no second act in American life.
To the rest of us mortals, 44 doesn't seem so large a number. At least not usually. My fellow 44-year-old scribe Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times, did point out to me the indignity of computer pull-down menus. When an airline asks for your year of birth, and you're forced to scroll down -- and down and down -- to find it on the website, it's like falling down an elevator shaft. As the years fly by with the speed of numbers on a gas pump, you are watching your life pass before your eyes.
None of this is a lament. Aging is a privilege. But in a big week for the 44th president, this 44-year-old man who has lived most of his life on the northern 44th parallel -- the part in Minnesota, Wisconsin and New York, alas, not the part along the Mediterranean -- 44 has been on my mind.
Most of us, whatever our age, don't have the means, or often the desire, to retire at 44.
We'd do well to heed the words of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote: "Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still."
He was a wise man, Thoreau, and packed a lot of life into his 44 years.
That is, if you still have the energy. This 44 year-old is going to have a nap.
Actually, the question that will keep me awake is how someone so notionally old has managed to remain so irredeemably immature.
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