I'm trying to figure out how I got this old. A friend said it's the old frog in the pot scenario. . . you don't notice the water getting hotter.
On the other hand, I used to tease my mom because she would never tell us how old she was. . . but when she got bifocals, there had been an ad on TV that said "You know you're over 40 when you need bifocals." So I stared gloating that, Haha, I knew she was over forty! I got bifocals when I was thirteen. . . so I started out as a middle-aged kid. . . and later in high school I was always being mistaken for a teacher. Now, in compensation, I look fifteen to twenty years younger than my real age.
It runs in my family. When my mom died at 96, her hair was the same color as mine is now, not a speck of gray or white, without the assistance of any chemicals. On the other hand, her two year younger sister had snow white hair. . . causing all kinds of confusion, which my Mom found completely hilarious, but that irked my aunt no end.
For example, a nurse at a hospital where we were taking my then 90 year old aunt in for some routine exams, asked my 92 year old mother, "Is it all right if we take your mother back to a room now?"
When my mother told the nurse this 'mother' was her YOUNGER sister, the flustered nurse apologized to my mother, instead of to my aunt. . . which really irritated my aunt even more than the original faux pas! She fumed about it all day. . . but except for the really white hair, my aunt could have passed for 65. Hilarious!
My elder daughter has never been carded in her life. On a school outing to the Great America amusement park, there was one of these midway games where the operator guaranteed he could guess either your weight or your age within a specific range or you won a prize. My daughter went for age. . . and distributed anything she had on that might give away her age due to style to her friends. She paid her dollar. The operator said she was twenty-seven. He refused to believe her when she told him how old she actaualy was. She had to show him her middle-school ID card along with her schoolmate friends' matching IDs to prove she was only thirteen to claim her prize! (She's now confessed to me that when she went to a friend's wedding as a bride's maid in Reno, she went to a casino and gambled when she was 17, and the waitresses their served her comp drinks, no questions asked, no carding! None of the others even tried it, including a couple who had fake IDs. She didn't. She just brazened it through.)
My younger daughter though will turn 40 next month and she still looks twenty-one and gets carded everywhere she goes. Go figure.
Hey Happy Birthday Sword!