Old & Young

It's a fine, blurry line--and I'm crossing it with increasing frequency. Plus: a fascinating feature from 100 years ago on this day.

Every day, I’m the oldest I’ve ever been…and I’m the youngest I’m ever going to be.

In recent years, this thought has crystallized in my mind. It’s surely not original, and it’s a variation on the hokey-but-absolutely accurate observation that I recall first hearing as a kid from the mouth of a friend’s mom:

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Here on the cusp of turning 56 ½ years of age, though, I’m struck by how often my days contain a blurry line between feeling and acting “young” and suspecting I’m growing really old.

Here’s today’s example: I was a basketball referee for three games on Chicago’s West Side, after which I came home, had lunch—and napped like a baby for two hours.

One moment I’m scooting up and down the court with kids, some one-seventh my age who don’t come up to my waist and others one-fourth my age who are as tall and certainly more athletic than I was in my physical prime.

Not much later, I can barely keep my eyes open as my wife catches me up on her day.

My fatigue wasn’t only physical. If you’ve ever officiated a sports event of some kind, then you know it’s a mentally arduous process.

This is true at any age level, but when it involves kids who double-dribble and travel and don’t look down at their feet to make sure they’re behind a line (or to see their untied shoes) and can’t hear me tell them where to come inbound the ball over the screaming cheerleaders and the bellowing parents and…and…and, well, this is just the start of the sensory-overload picture.

And we’re only about 20 seconds into the first quarter at this point.

Of course, I love it. So, no complaints here whatsoever. Just a little context as to one of the reasons¹ why The Inside Edge is over 12 hours past its usual “post” time.

Unclear/Nuclear

Last night, I came upon the word “nuclear” while reading the late Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot. (A really good book, by the way—I’m about one-quarter into it.)

In that millisecond, it hit me with bountiful clarity: “nuclear” is just a transposed letter off from “unclear.”

I texted my daughter:

“unclear
nuclear
…so dazzlingly similar!”

Seven minutes later, she indulged me with a “Yeah!”

The last year or two, I’ve grown increasingly animated at epiphanies like this. Maybe I see the similarity between “naïve” and “native” or “fiend” and “friend,” and I simply can’t keep it to myself. Recently, I nearly lost my mind when I saw a Buick in traffic and realized that it was only one letter away from “Quick.”

And now here I am broadcasting this tendency to you, too. Another sign of dramatically advanced aging? Or a community semantic service? Could it be both?

By the way, do you know any natives who are naïve? Or friends who are also fiends?

OTD, Exactly One Century Ago

If you think news these days is a bit wacky and dubious and cringe-worthy—first, you’re not alone. But second, it’s nothing new. As I enjoy doing from time to time, I took a gander, via Newspapers.com, to see what was in print 100 years ago on this day.

On January 11, 1925, if you read the Chicago Tribune from cover to cover, on page 123² you’d have come upon this uber-weirdness (click the image to get a closer look):

That’s right—you can “read character” by the contours of someone’s face and their signature. The newspaper paid each person $100 for being selected—that’s about $1,800 in today’s currency.³ I’d say the character trait shared by all is “entrepreneurial.”

Incidentally, “Doris Blake” was the pseudonym for advice columnist Antoinette Donnelly. Here’s a closer look at her assessment of two of those pictured above:

1. Another big reason: writer’s block.

2. Page 123!! That day there were 126 pages in all.

3. Wow! Newspapers had a robust budget back in the day. This was less than five years shy of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which helped usher in the Great Depression.