744…
Late last year I drove to Texas to attend my grandson’s graduation from Air Force basic training. We made it a dual visit, because my mother and brother live close by. We didn’t drive to all the main attractions, but we did tour the newly refurbished museum, and it was amazing. We also ate a lot of the real fake Mexican food, which my wife will go on and on about how good it is. But I think the original TV dinner in an aluminum tray with aluminum foil cover that mom had to bake in the oven when I was a kid was better. Still, I enjoyed the food, and I loved visiting family so far away. We spent many of those few nights watching cable shows, of course, but we also gathered at the dining room table and talked.
As always when I’m with my mother, she had to tell the story of when I was 13 months old. We were on a ship to Japan, and everyone aboard (mainly women, I suppose) was amazed that I could walk so well. Apparently I didn’t like crawling on my hands and knees—and I still don’t. The next part of the story is about when I was three years old and on another ship for our trip back to the states. She had told me that we were getting on a big boat, and of course a big ship looks like a big building from the dock, at least to a 36-month-old. So after we boarded, I pointed to a lifeboat and asked her if that was it, and she thought that was so cute. While she was telling that part to my wife, my brother, and my daughter when we were all sitting around the table, I wondered how many months old I was then. I used the calculator on my phone, and it turned out I was 740 months. I then wondered how old I’d be when I reach 1000 months. It’s 83.33 years, which will be on the 5th of June 2039. I enjoy calculating things like that.
I have never understood the tradition of months. Decades ago, I heard a mother, a friend of ours, say that her four and a half year-old was 54 months. As a young dad, I told people that my kids were one, and one and a half, and two, and two and a half, and I kept that up until they turned six, which is what I told everyone until they turned seven, and so on. When I lived in Korea (South) as an early teen, I was intrigued by their perception of age. A fresh born was said to be one, because that was the year he was in. When the baby was one year old, he was two, because he was now in his second year. It’s like how we count centuries: It’s 2018, but we’re in the 21st century.
I just recalculated, and I am now 744 months old. How many months are you?