Lynn Baber… for love of God and horses

Over coffee in bed this morning my husband and I tried to figure out how old middle age is. I am definitely middle-aged; no one in the room disagreed. The discussion really got rolling when we tried to determine whether or not my husband was still in middle age. I don’t think so; he’s not sure.

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The dogs had no opinion. They are smart little critters. They kept their heads down and pretended to sleep.

Do you speak ‘actuary’?

In order to understand the flavor of our conversation you need to know that my husband is a mathematician, having retired after nearly forty-years as a consulting actuary. If you don’t know what an actuary is you are not alone. Most folks don’t. Basically he was a mathematician of insurance.

So, his thought process wasn’t entirely on whether he is still middle-aged or has entered ‘elderly’; he was talkin’ confidence intervals, bell curves, ratios and such. As to the question itself, he wavered between upper middle-age and old.

After chewing on the question from a logical view, a statistical slant, and a looking-in-the-mirror perspective, we were unable to establish how old middle age really is.

If your kids are middle-aged, can you still be middle-aged?

Where does youth end? When do we leave grown-up and enter middle-age? When does middle-age frost over into elderly? Do we really even want to consider when elderly becomes old?

Nothing earth-shattering here, folks. It was just a very interesting and lively conversation. We got out of bed to go feed horses without establishing an answer to the question. We may have had a cacophony of creakiness as we got up, but we still got up and went to work anyway. Hey, that must count for something.

What do you think?