Tricycle | Awake in the World

I

In October of 1994 my brother John and I drove from New England to Iowa to revisit the farm town where we had grown up. I was thirty-eight years old, John was thirty-one, and our mother, who lived in the town and with whom we would be staying, was sixty-four.

I did not like being thirty-eight. Thirty-seven had been much better and thirty-nine when it came would be much better. Here I am only talking about the look and sound of numbers and not about the events that came in these particular years. Forty-one suited me, forty-three did not, and forty-four, my age now, is if nothing else better than forty-three.