The second best time (S3E0)
Clapping for appelflappen
Here is my last reference to the fact I’ll be uploading a video to YouTube every day between now and my 50th birthday. I really have no idea what they’ll be like, but I can say with a great deal of confidence the audio will (usually) be quite good.
A friend sends me a post on Instagram by the poet Hanif Abdurraqib, a series of screengrabs of an article he’d written for The New Yorker (Abdurraqib, not my friend), which contains this line about one’s pain: “It can be unique, but it can’t always be special”.1 And so here we are, heading towards 50, with pain that is unique because it is mine but that is not, in any way, special.
Search “on turning 50” in your engine of choice and you’ll discover many people have not only reached this age before, but have even written about it. Lists of 50 things the author now knows upon turning 50. Lists of things no one ever told the author about turning 50. Lists of things people are too scared to ask, or have hitherto never been revealed, or which, once you know them, will better prepare you to enjoy the experience of being alive for this specific length of time.
The one thing uniting all of them, and I say this with a lot of affection, is they’re not particularly good. They’re all maybe a bit bad. Turns out, there’s nothing profound about turning 50.
What happens when you turn 50 is you hit that age… and life keeps going. You just keep going. There’s not really a consensus on age at all anymore except that whatever age you happen to be is the new 10 years younger. (I hope 50 isn’t the new 40; I almost lost my mind at 40 and briefly hoped I’d just stop existing.)
Which makes it hard to write about, because anything you attribute to it sounds like an absurd reach. When my mum turned 50 her friend, a fellow Scot, got her a novelty cane resplendent with jokes about how old she’d become. It was very funny, and my mum loved it. It was not, in any way, a life-changing revelation.
But what if turning 50 did mean something. Not because of anything inherent, but because we all agreed it did. And by “we” I mean “some people now reading this” and by “agreed” I mean “no one told me no”. Apparently we can dream up our own gods and decide our own truths, and as messed up as that’s making everything it’s also, you’d have to agree, a pretty powerful idea. If all the terrible people can do it for evil, why can’t we awesome people do it for good?
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make up a bunch of things I think should happen when you turn 50 and then I’m going to set about making them happen. To phrase it another way, I’m going to decide what turning 50 means.
It’s now almost certainly the sub-optimal2 time for me to start anything. No sane person has ever said, “I’m going to wait til after 50 to get going on that.”3 You know the saying, the best time to [start a podcast, buy Apple stock.etc] was [2010, 2004. etc] and the second best time is now”? Well, after 50 it’s only ever the second best time. Second best time all the way down.
And when everything is the second best time you find your expectations of everything, literally everything, shifting down. This probably sounds a bit sad. It isn’t. It’s like a happiness cheat code.
Here’s a story about my dad:
My parents were here in early May, splitting their time between Haarlem and Amsterdam. On their first day in Amsterdam they found a bakery with “appelflappen”, triangular apple pastries usually with a crunchy crust. They are, in the best ways, like McDonald apple pies.4 They mentioned them literally every day after having one.
So on our last day together I decided I should try them. My dad lead us down the entire Red Light district, because “it’s the only way I know how to find it”. The bakery was unassuming and rammed, usually a good sign, the counter display full of cookies and cakes and croissants. Full, except for the space with the appelflappen.
It was empty.
Oh no, my dad said to no one in particular, placing his hand on the glass. Noooooo. At that moment, god as my witness, a man walked out of the back with a tray piled with appelflappen. And my dad clapped. He clapped the way a kid claps at a train museum, hands at head level, quickly flapping his arms.
Were you waiting for these, the man said.
That’s me, now. I’m at the bakery of life, clapping for appelflappen.5 (Side note: a few days before appelflappengeddon my dad had a religious experience with a fish. You know in The Joy Luck Club when Russell Wong eats a piece of watermelon? That’s how my dad ate this turbot. What I want you to understand is, my dad is 78 and still gets transported by food.)
Next time: the first thing I think turning 50 should could mean.
The entire quote:
He said, “Your pain is unique, because it’s yours. And you get to have that. But, when pressed up against all of the pain in the whole wide world, it isn’t special. It can be unique, but it can’t always be special.”
Sub-opthomal am I right???
If you’re waiting for retirement to start doing something you must not know any retired people.
The good deep fried ones, not these baked ones America has.
This is going to become a frequent reference so lock it in right now.
Honest Q: How many appelflappens did he have?
let us all never stop clapping for appelflappen