Publisher's Point Of View
Robert Allan Hooftallen

Vacation has come and gone. My pale skin is deep red, heading toward brown. My lips are cracked from too much sun. I've got a nice, new haircut.

On the outside, I'm looking my age, which is about all I can ask for these days, considering the abuse it takes trying to maintain my life's wicked pace.

And there's better news. My head is as clear as it can be. The strains of mid-life in perspective. The challenges of my professional future seem surmountable.

My family and my brother and sister-in-law drove to Florida in one night, something I've always wanted to do. Of 1,235 miles, I managed 1,125. My wife spelled me for a stint on I-95. The drive bordered on insanity at times, but having accomplished it, safely, it's an experience I'm glad to hold.

For a week, the days were hours and hours melted off the clock as seconds. And so many planned things were left for next year.

As usual, I betrayed myself with over-anticipation. It's a bad habit we all have; elevating our expectations to the point that the real experience has no chance of comparing to the fantasy we've created.

I was going to fish and never wet a line. I was going to scuba dive and never breathed under water. I was going to go to a spring training game and never even read a boxscore.

Waiting to the last minute to make official plans doesn't work sometimes, I now know.

So, we lounged and laughed. Ate and drank. And watched our children be children in a world of a thousand cool things to do, all within a couple hundred feet.

We took pictures. And then we took more pictures. It was a week of a million smiles, all worth a million bucks.

Those things took my mind away from duty and obligation and it began to see things for the first time.

As the days went by and my color went from a sickly white to a dangerous red, I could not find a mirror that I didn't like and even would go out of my way to marvel at how this new color was almost magically reviving my appearance- making me look younger, livelier, healthier, perhaps even handsome.

And then I started looking more closely. The beginnings of crow's feet wrinkles. A receding hairline. Body fat. Rogue white hairs in my eye brows. Scars.

It was mildly troubling at first, I'll admit, but I kept looking and found amusement in my decline. As a good friend of mine often says "there's a grace to every age."

Thirty-seven is just around the corner, a little over four months away. And if there's one thing this vacation helped drive into in my head, it's that I'm really not a kid anymore.

All of the sudden, I realized I'm not invincible.

Then I started looking at my behavior from that perspective. The drive down was calm. Road rage was a thing of my past. I couldn't recall a time when I got angry over another driver's failure to meet my expectations of driving etiquette.

The universally offending digit was kept in check. I did not tailgate within inches to force people out of my way. I didn't drive faster to make good time. I drove smarter.

I began to see that the decline of these physical things that we all cherish is a small price to pay for the wisdom, prudence and compassion of aging.

And when I looked in the mirror to check my tan, I no longer expected, or wanted, to see the reflection of a boy. Instead I searched it and me looking for the window to the inside of the man.

There's so much more inside of us than there is on the outside.

People will never break the spell of aging and if we do, our species is certainly doomed.

Aging is the check and the balance in a species that would otherwise go the way of Narcissus.