Feeling My Age

My lawnmower is gone. He moved away to college. With his departure, my wife and I took off the business casual clothing of active parents and slid into the comfortable shorts and Hawaiian shirts of empty-nesters. And you know what? It’s weird.

Really.

In the evenings, we no longer have to make sure that everyone has finished their math or packed their lunch or remembered to tell us about the forty-page book report about War and Peace that’s due first thing in the morning even though they have yet to technically read any actual part of the book including the title. My wife and I can enjoy meals which include sophisticated adult foods like broccoli, fish, and cheese that didn’t come from the inside of an aerosol can. We don’t have to worry about our television-viewing choices corrupting our children so we are fee to watch the evening news once more. In a lot of ways, it’s like being newlyweds all over-again; except we’re newlyweds with decades of experience.

Adapting to our new lifestyle isn’t easy. We’ve gone from warning our children about strangers to dropping them off on a University campus packed with strangers and now we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves. Somehow, the idea that both of our children are legally adults who can enter into contracts, cast votes, and have us committed to mental institutions has made us feel … old. We suddenly find ourselves lapsing into old-people speak and complaining the prices of things or starting statements with “When I was young…”

To be honest, we’re both a little frightened. So we did what any sensible, mid-life adults would do in our circumstances … ROAD TRIP!

Well, not exactly. It was an airplane trip, not a road trip. See my sciatica has been acting up and so has my lumbago and my trick knee doesn’t much care for long drives and it’s just easier to fly when you’re as old as I feel. So we flew to Buffalo, New York and then drove to Niagara Falls, Ontario which, for complicated historical reasons is located in an entirely different country called Canada.

Canada is conveniently located on the Canadian side of the northern border of the United States. Although Canadians are our friends now, during the War of 1812 they were our bitter enemies. The root cause of the war was a vast international disagreement between the the Americans, the Canadians, the British and the Native Americans over who got to claim which sport. In the end, the Americans got football and basketball, the Canadians got hockey and lacrosse, the British got cricket (which had to be shared with India) and soccer (which had to be shared with everyone else on the planet) and the Native Americans got table-gaming and off-track betting. I don’t think I have to tell you who came out on top.

Another, lesser issue in the war was whether words like ‘center’ and ‘theater’ should be spelled with an ‘re’ or an ‘er’ at the end. One of the key features of the Treaty of Ghent was that each side retained the right to spell words any foolish way they chose.

We went there because Niagara Falls is one of the most romantic places on the planet. It’s better than Paris or Rome or every Senior Prom ever — even the one in High School Musical III: Revenge of the Fallen. The lush, green countryside is home to some of the most beautiful and amazing gift shops on the planet. You can’t walk more than five feet (or one-hundred fifty-four centimeters as they reckon distance in Canada) without encountering a new and different gift shop. If you were caught in the rain you could stay dry by dashing store to store. If you were starving, you could survive on genuine, souvenir Canadian maple syrup and ice cream treats. If you were thirsty, you’d just have to stay that way because I’m certainly not paying three bucks a bottle for water. Especially not when there’s like a bazillion gallons (seventy-one-point-nine kilovolts, metric) gushing over the falls every second. With that much water what gives them the nerve to charge for a few ounces?

Sorry. I got old for a minute there.

The falls themselves are a joint Canadian-American venture that was thoughtfully constructed on a vacant lot in front of a great many expensive hotels and convenient to many nearby attractions including the Hollywood Wax Museum, Skylon Tower, and the Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not Museum. It is also near a surprising number of wedding chapels. In the greater Niagara Falls area there are more places to get married than there are Starbucks locations. (Aside: There might be an opportunity here for Starbucks if they can figure out how to offer a “two lattes, no foam, one marriage license” value deal.)

As the old saying goes, “where there are wedding chapels, there are newlyweds” and this was certainly true in Niagara Falls. Everywhere you looked there were happy couples with shiny, new rings staring at each other with big puppy-dog eyes while they strolled along the sidewalk, bumped into lampposts or went over the falls in a barrel. Seeing them activated my new-found old-guy instincts and made me want to say, “Oh sure it’s all hearts and flowers now, but just wait until you’re up at three a.m. with a cranky, croupy three-year-old who hasn’t slept since the last ice age and an eighteen-month-old who has been teething for approximately the same length of time it takes to earn a degree in neurosurgery.”

Seeing them, and knowing that lay in their future made us feel self-satisfied and smug in a “been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wore it until it was all full of holes” sort of way … until we met the couple who just celebrated their fifty-fifth anniversary and we realized that we’ve got a long way to go.