72 degrees Fahrenheit is what most of us set our thermostats to, both winter and summer. It’s an ideal temperature; a little cool for a swimming pool, a little hot for a tub of potato salad, it’s seen as, generally, a popular temperature overall. It’s what Los Angeles is. 72 degrees is just perfect.

32 degrees has great press: Christmas and winter and even though over half the country never sees a single flake of snow it’s RIGHT THERE ON TV, in cartoons and stop motion animations and romantic comedies about princesses who don’t even know they are princesses until one day a mysterious letter arrives as they are putting the final touches on a four-layer wedding cake in the back of their artisanal gluten-free bakery in a midwestern city. 32 degrees is ice in a glass and frost on the windshield of your car. 32 degrees is frozen.

59.Fifty nine.

Sweater, right? You wear a sweater when it’s 59 degrees out… a light one, but still.

It’s not warm, 59. You’d never say “Wow, it’s 59, let’s go work on our tans!”

Nope.

59 lacks the crisp bite of, say… 42, but doesn’t approach the reassuring aura of 68. 68 is almost 70.

Which is almost 72.

Today is my birthday. I am 59 years old. Some of my friends tell me I don’t look a day over a number less than 59 (which is incredibly sweet of them). As a lifelong fan of Steve Martin I aspire toward white hair, and I don’t know how other folks my age are feeling, but I feel like most of my serious wrinkles are on the inside.

I’m not really discouraged. I am tired, but not entirely weary, and I greatly appreciate the privilege to live a life that bridges the worlds between Count Basie and Doechii. I stand as a testament to age being just a number, unless I’m actually on the ground, in which case I stand slowly, as a testament to the fact that it takes me a little longer to stand up than it used to. (I thought for a while I had unknowingly become significantly taller and the new dizziness upon rising was a sudden shift in altitude.)

Fifty nine is not sixty. I will feel younger at sixty. I will feel like George Clooney at sixty: salt and pepper hair and that thing where one eyebrow is always slightly higher than the other, a wry yet gentle smirk on my clean shaven yet subtly textured face. But that’s NEXT year.

This year I am “almost sixty”. This year people will ask me what my plans are for my next birthday. Over eighty percent of them will expect that I am going on a vacation, somewhere interesting.

Probably somewhere warm.

My birthday is in autumn, and I truly am an autumn child. True story: I had always thought I was a Thursday Child as well (“far to go”) but I just this week realized that I was in fact a Sunday Child (“bonny and blithe”). So I’ve got that going for me.

A week from Halloween, my birthday is “spooky adjacent”. Not quite close enough for a skull cake or a costume party, but always accompanied by leaves on the ground, pumpkin decorations, and a deep-sweeping chill in the wind. There was always a pile of coats at the birthday parties I was lucky enough to have, and the air was special - lacking the harshness of December or the earthy-sweetness of November, it was just clear and cool and incredibly appreciated by kids with pollen allergies.

I have celebrated my birthday near the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Missouri River, but never once have I been somewhere warm, like with a beach, because I actually love WHEN my birthday is, and specifically the typical North American midwestern weather patterns during this time of year.

Fifty nine is not warm. It necessitates a coat, but not a winter one - a jacket I can wear a sweatshirt underneath to provide plenty of pockets for all my comic books, yo-yos and playing cards. It’s cool enough to feel the air enter your lungs but not panic them. A brisk walk will warm you right up, and a mug of hot cider won’t overheat you too much.

It’s not sixty. It’s not. 59 knows it’s not. 59 isn’t fancy. 59 is proud to be the endnotes of my “maiden” phase, if not the back cover. 59 is a little rounder, a little more careful, and sleeps always for some reason in the slightest draft.

59 aspires toward a more comfortable 72, and even has dreams of the balmy mid-eighties. For now, I will just put on a sweater and keep going, comic book in hand, yo-yo at the ready: not quite a grown up yet, but getting warmer.

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