I'M SO EXCITED, I'M SO EXCITED...I'M SO...SCARED!

Well, in reference to my upcoming forty first birthday I am neither excited nor am I scared.  You see, I have never been one that got anxious about a birthday nor did have I ever dreaded one.  Okay, I will readily admit that I turned 25 with a little bit of trepidation but it was only because I was not yet safely installed in my New York City apartment that I was going to buy after Oprah reviewed my very first breakout novel that was going to make me more famous then Brett Easton Ellis was after writing Less Than Zero.  Even last year when people we going around with big, goofy smiles saying "someone's going to be forty soon!" or "guess who's going to be forty soon?" I wasn't bothered.  Yes, I showed them all up by turning forty in Manhattan with one of my best friends but I didn't do it because I thought I had a point to prove.  Well, maybe I did.

My point here however is that birthdays or my age in general don't bother me.  Or they didn't until two very recent events that made me long for the days when I sold hermit crabs in Gulf Shores and my biggest worry was how quickly I could get to the Flora-Bama after I got off work.

A friend of mine who is two years younger then me has two daughters who somehow managed to get hold of her wallet.  Her oldes daughter came running up to her with a look of shock on her face and pointed to her drivers license and asked "Mom!  Were you really born in the 1900's?"

I almost choked on my vodka and sprite.  I remember being in school and when the word "hundreds" was added to anything it meant that thing was old.  No two ways about it.  It was old.  Never before had a gauged my age to anything.  I wasn't alive when Kennedy was killed, when the first man walked on the moon, or when Hurricane Camille made landfall and I considered all of these things benchmarks to my age.

Until it hit me that all of these things happened in the 1900's.  The century I was born in.  The 100 years in which I was born in that are now over.

Well, I somehow managed to pull myself together from this and went on about life fully aware that my birth century was gone but that I was still very young in body and even younger in heart.

Until this happened.

My Mardi Gras organization had come up with the theme of "The Golden Age of Television" as a theme and we were all picking what our individual thing was going to be.  When "Saved By The Bell" was picked I was more excited then I should have been.  I men I remember when the show was called "Good Morning, Miss Bliss" for Gods sake.  As I was making note of this someone next to me whispered "I've never heard of that show. When did it come on?"    After explaining the show to her and recounting the years that it came on her response was, and not out of malice, "Oh, I think my Mom watched that when I was a baby."  The look on my face had to have been the exact same one that I gave my mother when I begged her to buy me the cassette of "Private Dancer" by this awesome new singer named Tina Turner.

I almost threw up.

I remember AC Slaters first day of school, Principal Belding, Zach taking Kelly to their own prom, and of course Jessie Spano's infamous caffeine pill addiction were she lamented that she was so excited and yet so scared!  Caffeine pills!?! 

I still don't mind my birthdays and I still don't care how old I am, after all, the alternative could be much worse.  However it is a little unsettling to think that the century you were born in is over and the parents of a friend of yours watched one of your favorite shows on television the same time you did.  I'm just waiting for someone to ask me if I have seen that new great show called "Dallas" that just started.