Barry - Dave Barry turns 40

ell, its finally happening. Im talking about the long-predicted Aging Process. I see many signs of it in my own life. For example, I have become tremendously concerned about my gums. There was a time when I could go for decades without thinking about my gums, but recently they have come to loom far larger in my mind than the Greenhouse Effect.

Also, young people I meet keep using the word Mister, causing me to whirl around and look behind me, expecting to see somebody with whom I associate this title, such as the Pope or Walter Cronkite, only to realize that these young people are talking to me.

Also, if I attempt to throw a softball without carefully warming up, I have to wait until approximately the next presidential administration before I can attempt to do this again.

Also, I have long, animated conversations with my friendsfriends with whom I used to ingest banned substances and swim nakedon the importance of dietary fiber.

Also, I find myself asking my son, in a solemn parental voice, the same profoundly stupid old-fogey questions that my parents used to ask me, such as: Do you want to poke somebodys eye out?

Alsothis is most terrifyingI sometimes catch myself humming along to elevator music.

Of course Im not alone. Growing older is a Major Lifestyle Trend, potentially even bigger than cable television. Millions of us, the entire legendary Baby Boom herd of Mouseketeer-watching, Hula-Hoop-spinning, Beatles-admiring, hair-growing, pot-smoking, funky-chicken-dancing, lovemaking, resume-writing, career-pursuing, insurance-buying, fitness-obsessing, Lamaze-class-taking, breast-feeding, data-processing, mortgage-paying, Parents-Night-attending, business-card-exchanging, compact-disc-owning, tooth-flossing individuals, are lunging toward:

MIDDLE AGE

Yes. Say it out loud, Boomers: We are MIDDLE-AGED. The time has come for us to stop identifying with Wally and The Beav; we are now a lot closer to Ward and June. Somebody has to be the grownups, and now its our turn.

The problem is, Im not sure were ready. Ive been hanging around with people roughly my own age for the bulk of my life, and I frankly do not feel that, as a group, we have acquired the wisdom and maturity needed to run the world, or even necessarily power tools. Many of us, Im convinced, only look like grownups.

For example, I work for a newspaper Sunday magazine whose staff consists mostly of people about my age. If you happened to visit us briefly from the outside world, wed strike you as being regular middle-aged guys with ties and desks and families and various degrees of hair loss. Huh! youd say. This is a group of adults charged with putting out a magazine under constant deadline pressure! They must be very responsible! Then youd leave, and wed resume playing chairball, a game we invented one day in the conference room while attempting to hold a conference, in which the players scuttle violently around on rolling chairs, trying to throw a foam-rubber ball through a hoop up on the wall.

I dont mean to suggest that all we do, at the office, is play chairball. Sometimes we throw the Frisbee. Sometimes we practice our juggling. Sometimes we even put out the magazine, but you would never conclude, if you secretly observed us for several weeks, that this was anywhere near our highest priority.

And I dont think its just me and my co-workers who do stuff like this. I think the entire Baby Boom generation is having trouble letting go of the idea that it represents The Nations Youth and has an inalienable right to be wild and carefree. The whole Iran-contra scandal, in my opinion, basically boiled down to some fortyish guys in the White House basement playing an international top-secret multimillion-dollar version of chairball.

This is why Im alarmed at the prospect of somebody my age getting into the Oval Office. Because I know that if I got in there, Id probably be okay for the first few days, but then Id do something to amuse myself, such as order the Marines to invade Cleveland, or issue a proclamation honoring Nasal Discharge Week, or leave a prank message on the Hot Phone answering machine (Thanks for calling the White House. We cant recall our bombers right now, but if you leave your name and the time you called ).

But the alarming truth is, people my age are taking over the government, along with almost everything else. And what is even more terrifying, Im seeing more and more important jobs being done by people who are even younger than I am. The scariest example is doctors. If you wake up from a terrible accident to find yourself strapped down on your back in an operating room awaiting emergency surgery, and a person walks in who is about to open you up with a sharp implement and root around among your personal organs, you want this person to look as much as possible like Robert Young, right? Well, today the odds are that youre going to look up and see Sean Penn.

And lets talk about airline pilots. I have long felt that if Im going to risk my life and valuable carry-on belongings in a profoundly heavy machine going absurdly fast way the hell up in the air over places such as Arkansas, where I dont even know anybody, then I want whoever is operating this machine to be much older and more mature than I. But now I routinely get on planes where the entire flight crew looks like its raising money for its Class Trip. I am very nervous on these flights. I want the crew to leave the cockpit door open so I can make sure theyre not using the navigational computer to play Death Blasters from Planet Doom.

Im not suggesting that anything can be done about this trend. I mean, we cant pass a law requiring, for example, that airline pilots always have to be older than we are. That could become a real problem once we started reaching, say, our eighties (This is your captain, and my name is, um its my name is right on the tip of my tongue ).