Xutos Turns 30, Worms Licking Their Chops

By Nathaniel Hoffman, 6-24-07

	Caption: Riding to Stack Rock on my 30th unaware that the entire event was a ruse to get me to a surprise party. A clever ruse.

My buddy Al does not recall turning 30. He told me this on Saturday night at a ridge top campground behind Boise’s Bogus Basin ski area where 40 of my closest friends gathered surreptitiously to celebrate my 30th birthday.

Al was the senior guest at the party. I think he is in his 70’s and is justified in forgetting his 30th. He was in grad school then, probably reading and rereading T.S. Elliot.

But I have no such excuse for forgetting birthdays. I just don’t put that much thought into the passing years. The significance that we put on age should end at about 18. I stopped counting around my 20th year.

Perhaps it had something to do with meeting my wife, an older woman, when I was 20. Tara recalls spotting an e-mail I sent to a few of my buddies bragging that I was dating a 25-year-old. She was incredulous at the time, reminding me that she was only 24.

But that was the point. The number didn’t matter to me. She was in her 20s, I was in my 20s, who cares.

Then I met this woman named Alex who was truly of indeterminate age. She refused to reveal her age. But not with the usual female shame of getting old. It was an intense ideological opposition to counting years. I asked her about it many times and then gave up on getting a full answer.

She is older than me and, last I checked, is making puppets in the Czech Republic.

My daughter, who knows she is two, but is not sure what it means to be two, also makes puppets.

The guy who took me biking on my birthday, working as a secret agent for my wife’s party planning gulag, is so old he thinks he’s dying. The woman I rode with on Father’s Day just turned 40 and she kicked my ass both uphill and down.

And my 30th was the first party with a quorum of snotty nosed little kids running around the keg. Two sets of twins. A few pyromaniacs. Stomachs full of marshmallows.

But even the presence of little kids at the party have nothing to do with my age or generation. Half the dads could be my dads! One of them, a 1957 baby who is expecting a second child, stayed up late around the fire finishing off the keg and wondering aloud why all the 30 somethings were snoring in their tents.

On my first day of my 30th year (or is it my 31st year?) I stepped out of my tent at 6 am to see a perfect orange sun rising over the mountains. The kind of early sun that you can stare at without squinting.

Like every year on my birthday, I felt like I was just getting started.