OK, so, story time. Sometime in the summer of 2001, when I still lived in Massachusetts, my grandfather came down for a visit. While he was there, we went to the museum at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site.

On the drive over, we were talking about how he and my grandmother had recently decided to leave their home in the tiny woods community of Oxbow, which they loved, and move closer to the nearest town big enough to have a hospital. Gram had some increasing health challenges, and moving closer to town seemed like the grown-up thing to do, even though neither of them really wanted to.

At the time we had that conversation, I was 28 and had recently been laid off from what turned out to be the last of a string of mostly pointless tech jobs I'd been chasing for the past eight years and had no earthly idea what the hell I was going to do next. I said pretty much exactly the above, particularly the "when am I supposed to start feeling like I'm on top of this shit" question.

Gramp thought about it for a second and then said, "Well... I'll let you know."

This was a 71-year-old man who had, in the course of his life to that date:

- Extensively renovated or just outright built every home he lived in since moving out on his own. (He went onto build another house, admittedly with a lot of help from my father and some of his friends, after we had that conversation.)
- Made all his own furniture, and most of my father's, and a fair percentage of mine.
- Got married once, at 20, and was still married to the same woman when she died 65 years later.
- Fathered four children, all of whom survived into adulthood (which was still a fairly neat trick if you were born in rural America in the 1950s).
- Competed at a very high level in military-style rifle shooting, including being a member of the U.S. Army Reserve team that won its class at the Camp Perry National Matches one year.
- Resigned his commission as an officer in said Army Reserve, only a year or so shy of vesting his full pension, in principled protest over the war in Vietnam.
- Taught high school English for 20-odd years.
- Worked for the Maine Forest Service for many years after his teaching career, because he found retirement unendurably boring.
- Generally possessed the kind of skill set and psyche that would have made him one of those guys who survive a plane crash in the remote wilderness and hike out of the woods six months after being given up for dead, wondering why everyone's so surprised.

And he was telling me he had no idea when a man ceases to feel like three kids in a trench coat and starts to feel like an Actual Grown-Up, because it hadn't happened to him yet either.

At that point I decided there was no point worrying about it and, in fact, everyone is just making it up as they go along.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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