Barry - Dave Barry turns 50

SURE TO PLEASE HIS FANS.
The New York Times

Barry will prompt most baby boomers to laugh out loud His chapters on retirement planning and facing mortality are not only funny but right on. Right onyou remember that phrase, dont you?

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

Barrys light-hearted, Everyman humor and what-me-worry grin have evoked comparisons with Mark Twain and Will Rogers, and earned him the Washington Post designation of Americas Humorist.

San Francisco Examiner

With age comes wisdom, among other ailments. [Barrys] no longer the happy-go-lucky, long-haired weirdo of his youth. Now the long hair sprouts from his ears. Getting older may be inevitable, but as Barry shows, theres no reason to take it with a straight face.

BookPage

Its the look back at TV commercials, politics, inventions, and attitudes that really makes those who have seen it all (much of it through trifocals) chortle out loud. Its not unlike an archeological dig through an attic, choking from laughter rather than dust, as familiar and forgotten memories are refreshed and taken for a satirical synaptic spin by a master humorist.

Publishers Weekly

Guess youd better buy this book now while you can still read the print.

Library Journal

A bushel of chuckles for readers.

Booklist

Also by Dave Barry

The Taming of the Screw
Babies and Other Hazards of Sex
Stay Fit and Healthy Until Youre Dead
Claw Your Way to the Top
Bad Habits
Dave Barrys Guide to Marriage and/or Sex
Homes and Other Black Holes
Dave Barrys Greatest Hits
Dave Barry Slept Here
Dave Barry Turns 40
Dave Barry Talks Back
Dave Barrys Only Travel Guide Youll Ever Need
Dave Barry Does Japan
Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up
Dave Barrys Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides
Dave Barrys Complete Guide to Guys
Dave Barry in Cyberspace
Dave Barrys Book of Bad Songs
Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus
Big Trouble
Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway
Tricky Business

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 1998 by Dave Barry

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Ltd., Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90674

eISBN: 978-0-307-77804-8

This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

v3.1

CONTENTS

Its Great to Be 50!

I am NOT going to whine.

Yes, I have turned 50.

Yes, this is an age that I used to consider old. Not middle-aged, like Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show; but actually old, like Walter Brennan as Granpappy Amos in The Real McCoys, gimping around cluelessly in a pair of bib overalls and saying things like Con-SARN it!

But I do not choose to dwell on the negative. I choose to be an optimist, like the great explorer Christopher Columbus, who had a dream that he could sail a ship all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. People said he was crazy, but Columbus did not know the meaning of the word discouragement. (He also did not know the meaning of nostril or weasel, because he spoke Italian.)

And so Columbus boldly set out and discovered the New World, and then he went back to Europe, where he died in obscurity at age 55, which is only five years older than I am right now! OH GOD! MY LIFE IS OVER!!!

No, scratch that. I really am going to be positive in this book, instead of dwelling on the negative aspects of turning 50, such as that you get wrinkled and forgetful and achy, and you gain weight merely by watching food commercials, and the warranties are expiring on all your remaining teeth and internal organs, and your idea of a big night is to stay up late enough to see the previews for Letterman, whose actual show you have not watched since the Reagan administration.

I am not going to dwell on those things, nor am I going to mention the fact that when you get to this age, you discover random hairs sprouting from unexpected sectors of your body, so that, in addition to all the other little maintenance tasks youve always performed each day, you find yourself asking questions like: Did I remember to pluck my ears?

And I am not going to even mention the word prostate.

Instead, Im going to talk about the good things that happen to you when you turn 50, such as

Okay, give me a minute here

All right, heres one: You cant read anything. At least I cant. Actually, this started happening to me when I was 48; I started noticing that when I tried to read restaurant menus, they looked like this:

Entrees

Broasted free-range fennel shootlets with modules of prawn $19

Pecan-encrusted apricot-glazed garlic-enhanced shank of frog $27

Liver en Fester dans une bunche de crme de corne $21

At first I thought that this had nothing to do with methat, for some reason, possibly to save ink, the restaurants had started printing their menus in letters the height of bacteria; all I could see was little blurs. But for some reason, everybody else seemed to be able to read the menus. Not wishing to draw attention to myself, I started ordering my food by simply pointing to a likely looking blur.

ME (pointing to a blur): Ill have this.

WAITER: Youll have We Do Not Accept Personal Checks?

ME: Make that medium rare.

Pretty soon I started noticing that everything I tried to readnewspapers, books, nasal-spray instructions, the United States Constitutionhad been changed to the bacteria-letter format. I also discovered that, contrary to common sense, I could read these letters if I got farther away from them. So for a while I dealt with the situation by ordering off the menus of people sitting at other tables.

Id like to order some dessert, Id tell the waiter. Please bring a menu to the people at that table over there and ask them to hold it up so I can see it.