“Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’  Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’”

                                                                          – Charles M. Schulz

I turned 50 recently.  I mention this not in a play for well wishes or, certainly, for presents, but to explain why I am doing my first—and long overdue—formal self-evaluation.  To be clear, this is not a review of  The Johnston Papers, but of the Johnston life.

This will not be, I promise, another of those tiresome, self-deprecatory, I’m-so-old-and-out-of-touch pieces (“I had to hire a teenager to show me how to use my new phone, ha-ha!”) that people write when they turn 50 (or 40, or 60), on the mistaken assumption that no one else has ever had the same experience.  I am well aware that many of my readers also have recently turned 50; I’m nothing special. 

Rather, this is an accounting.  All of us should account for ourselves.  Some believe they will be called on to do so before a supreme being at life’s end.  I don’t.  Still, it can’t hurt to have a draft on hand.  If I am never required to submit it formally, it nevertheless will serve, in the interim, to explain myself to my peers.  Further, beyond fulfilling my own obligation, I hope I may inspire some self-evaluation among others.  There is not enough of that in the world. 

The half-century milestone seems an appropriate occasion.  Here is my report. 

All parents (I assume) ask their children, as soon as the latter are able to understand the concept, what they want to be when they grow up.  I don’t know what my parents expected when they posed the question at about the time of my fifth birthday, but it’s a safe bet that they did not anticipate my eager and certain response:  “A woman with legs and no pants!”  It was some time before they asked again.

Later, my standard answer became somewhat more prosaic:  “a millionaire.”  From there it continued to deteriorate.  By age 10, it had come to this:  “a lawyer.”  Embarrassing but true:  while other kids were thinking about becoming firemen and auto racers, I was fantasizing about estate planning.

Oh, there was one other thing:  I was going to be the president of the United States.  Of course, I would start as a lawyer and quickly move into politics, since that had worked well for my hero, Richard Nixon.  I am not being ironic here.  I was not like other children.

I honestly don’t know what was wrong with me.

Yes, I know you’re waiting for an explanation of the legs-and-no-pants ambition.  You’ll get it, but not just yet.  I’m not sure I ever did explain it to my parents, so you can wait a few paragraphs.

Judged by those goals, I’ve been mostly a failure.  True, I did become a lawyer—there’s  one uninspired goal achieved.  Millionaire?  Not yet and probably never—certainly not in 1960s dollars, and probably not even in current dollars.  The presidency seems increasingly unlikely, and an additional plan that I picked up along the way—to retire by age 50—is now officially impossible.

In fact—this is troubling—I have a better chance of becoming a woman with legs and no pants than of realizing any of my other early aspirations.  Some hormone treatments, a fairly routine surgery, a name change—Cordelia has a certain ring to it—and then it’s a simple matter of delivering all my pants to Goodwill.

Of course, those were childish goals, and failing to achieve them is no shame.  What is embarrassing is that for most of my life, I bought into the most insidious of all ambitions:  to be comfortable.  You stockpile enough money that you can pay someone else to provide all your daily needs, then you pass the time playing golf or watching football or sitting on the deck with a cold drink, and you tell yourself you’re living the good life.  In reality, it’s not life at all, but the deliberate avoidance of life.

By the end of year 40, here’s what I had accomplished:  I had earned a law degree and spent 15 years at a job that enabled me to stay off the dole.  Snore.  This life was barely meeting expectations.  Had anyone chosen to do a performance review at the time, termination would have been indicated.  Fortunately for me, if there is a God, He apparently spends a lot of time napping.

Most lives, I suspect, comprise several distinct periods, rarely defined by stages of physical maturity or by legal definitions of minority and majority.  As it turns out, 40 years marked the end of the first stage in my life:  infancy.  That was followed by a 10-year coming of age.  I believe I am now entering full adulthood, although that remains to be established.

If 50 years seems like a long path to adulthood, I submit that it’s hardly unusual.  There are prominent examples everywhere.  As Exhibits A and B, I offer our 42^nd and 43^rd presidents, Slick Willie and Incurious George, both now 63 and still stuck somewhere in emotional adolescence—proving that one can be a millionaire and president and still be a failure.  It’s gotten to the point, in fact, that an American president can win a Nobel prize merely for being a grown-up.

There may be people reading this who are not as far along in the maturation process as they have assumed.  I encourage you to think about it.  We all have work to do, and I suspect most of us aren’t doing it.

The precise moment when my own childhood ended may never be identified, but the beginning of the end may be traceable to the day, shortly before my 40^th birthday, when I was dragged unconscious from the bottom of a swimming pool.  It was the first interesting thing that had happened to me.

I will accept an F for the first 40 years if I can be graded separately on the ten that followed.  I still have a long way to go, but the momentum seems to have turned.

And the cartoonist was right.  This is going to take more than one session.

*****************

All right, here’s what happened.  I was in the grocery store with my mother one day when I was about five, and I saw a woman who had only one leg.  She was wearing pants, so of course one leg of the pants was unoccupied.  In my memory, she was walking unaided, although I know that’s impossible—probably she was standing still and I didn’t notice her crutches.  (She definitely was standing.)

I thought this was cool.  I wondered what it would be like to have one leg, or no legs, but still wear pants.  So that, for a day or two, became my ambition—to be just like that woman, with pants and no legs.  Apparently I wasn’t imaginative enough to consider that this option was available to men, too.  When asked what I wanted to be, I was so enthusiastic that the words came out in the wrong order—a woman with legs and no pants, rather than with pants and no legs.

You see?  It’s not so weird.  Okay, it’s weird, but no weirder than wanting to be a lawyer.

Next:  Life begins at 40.