Not twenty-five

Speaking with a friend just before church yesterday I made the evidently astonishing statement that “I’d rather be eighty than twenty-five,” and it has been, not haunting me, but visiting and revisiting ever since I admitted it. If I were honest, which in my case is always doubtful at best, the rest of the statement, which I stopped before blurting, might have been, “might as well, hadn’t I,” sounding grim and fatalistic but without a question mark to make it rhetorical. But it's true.

Would I go back to twenty-five? Here’s the thing. Life was so filled with opportunities and choices and forks in the road. Let’s say most of them were easy, obvious, because I reckon they were. But some of them were tough, really difficult, some few even gut-wrenching, and the second-guessing afterward heartrending for many reasons. In order to end up here and now, I had to make all my exact choices, take all the exact same forks, have all the exact same things happen at precisely that microsecond. If I were coming along again from twenty-five I know I'd mess it up as I nearly did so many times the first time. 

I wouldn’t change a thing of it. There’s the muse, “if only I had known then what I know now.” No. If I had known, some determinative microsecond would surely have been different, some other road taken. If for some reason of infinity or eternity I had to go back, I would never go back into childhood. That would have to be over and done, beyond parental control. After, but immediately after. I’d choose seventeen. The night I graduated from Bay High, I'd start there, no sooner, no later. And at eighteen, I’d make sure again to crowd into the lecture hall to hear Robert Frost. But for damn sure, I choose eighty over twenty-five.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.