35

Tomorrow, on St. Katherine’s Day, I’ll be 35 years old. Hunh. That sort of snuck up on me.

I’m not one to make a fuss about birthdays, though Lord knows I enjoy a nice meal and a present, but 25 and 30 proved memorable milestones. I clearly recall waking up in my Boston apartment on my 25th birthday, staring at the ceiling, and thinking, “Oh, wow. Now what?” It was almost as though I felt that we’re each owed a good 25 years, and after that everything is gravy.

At the time I was a single grad student with a highly active social life and a great deal of strength. An hour of power lifting a day will do that for you. My main preoccupation, however, was looking for love. I wanted a wife, kids. My dating orientation had always skewed toward marriage, even when I was much too young to seriously consider such things. I wanted to stop accruing degrees and actually go out to do something with my life.

Five years later, I’d moved from Boston back to Philadelphia out to Fargo and then to a little town in the middle of nowhere Minnesota. I had a wife, a house (a mead hall, really), a full-time parish, and a son. 5.2 acres had proved quite the switch for someone used to living in apartments and efficiencies for the previous decade. I’d gone from a suburbanite to a city student to a country boy—if transplanted. My definitions of “small town” and “winter” kept changing. Oh, and all that lifting went pretty much out the window. As did the social life.

And I remember turning 30 and quite clearly thinking, “Wow. I have everything I’ve ever wanted. I wonder what happens next.”

Well, now I’m 35, or will be tomorrow. I’ve got three kids and a slew of experiences under my belt that I never expected to have. I’ve made pilgrimage to Israel and cruised down to the Caribbean. I learned to fish, bow hunt, and ride the 750 lb. Harley that I won in the undertaker’s raffle. (Literally. The undertaker ran the Harley raffle. For charity.) I’ve learned more than 1200 years of family history, documentary and genetic: we can now trace our roots back to Eleanor of Aquitaine, William the Conqueror, and Charlemagne. I found out that I’m about one-third Irish, one-third Viking, and one-third most everything else in Europe. (Sorry, no Finnish or Ashkenazic. But everything else.)

I got involved with the Knights Templar, the Society of the Holy Trinity, and the Sons of the American Revolution. I learned more about Judaism, Catholicism, and paganism than I ever thought I’d know. And my daughters have provided me with a much more practical education in Disney princesses, fairies, and My Little Pony. We tend to make it into the newspapers fairly regularly; so far we’ve hit papers from the Fargo Forum to the Boston Globe to the Jewish Daily Forward. I’ve often thought that perhaps I should write a book, but what could I say that others haven’t already said better? I’ve often wondered about going back for a PhD, but I can’t quite figure out of that’s something I really want or just something I think I’m supposed to want.

I pray a lot more than I used to. I’ve dropped a lot of bad habits, but not to worry; I’ve plenty more that have yet to drop. I think I might finally have managed to squeeze past the stage in life when you keep accruing things, and instead turn that corner of beginning to streamline and simplify. Maybe. Possibly. I hope.

My wife and I have been through a lot together. Pediatric surgeries. Deaths in the family. Horrible bosses. Seven years of no sleep. And I think we really have grown all the stronger for it. Clearly we’re in this for the long haul. We’ve invested too much in one another, and heaven knows I’d never find anyone else who could ever put up with me being so—well, me. Love is a many splendored thing.

So now I’m 35, and I really have no idea what comes next. More parenting, obviously. But beyond that, it’s gratifying to see how much we’ve really grown up these last five or ten years, and done so together. Next year brings a belated honeymoon, with a lavishly long cruise to Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Scotland, and England—my homelands, as it turns out. (All made possible, again, by the undertaker, after we sold the aforementioned Harley some two years later.) Hopefully I can get my old strength back. Hopefully I can read all of these books I’ve piled up sometime before I die. Hopefully my kids let me make it to 40.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be horribly self-indulgent. But this is a blog, after all. Don’t worry. I promise not to do this more than twice a decade or so. Life is hard, but also good. And really, would we have it any other way? Here’s to the next 35. Skol.