What Do You Do When Your Birthday is on Friday the 13th? Nothing.

Tomorrow is my birthday. My 45th birthday. 45 years. Halfway to 90.

That’s a pretty hard number, actually.  90 is pretty old. Not a lot of people live to 90.  In fact, a quick internet search shows that only about 1% of people in this country live to be over 90.  So the odds say that I am halfway to dead.

The more immediate concern is that I can no longer say that I’m in my early 40s.  I’ve been saying that since the moment I turned 40, and I’ve gotten as much mileage out of it as I can.  But I can’t resist the dreaded “mid-40s” anymore, although I expect to stay in my mid-40s for another five full years, until I hit the next big milestone.

So I’m in my mid-40s.  It’s a little weird for me, because much of my life I’ve kind of defined myself by being “the young one.”  When I was a kid, all my friends were older than me, which wasn’t strange because I hit puberty early and always looked a lot older than I was.  When I was in my mid-teens, I looked over 21, and was actually the best candidate among my friends to be able to buy beer. Which is why they probably hung out with me.

(I’m assuming, by the way, that the statute of limitations on illegally buying beer has long since passed, but if it hasn’t I want to make clear that I just made all that up).

Being the “young” one carried with me for a long time. I was one of the younger students in law school, since I came straight out of college. In my jobs out of law school — clerking, then at a big law firm — I was generally a lot younger than the other people I worked with.  Then I started teaching, the “young professor,” much closer in age to the students than the other professors.  Even when I started working at my real estate company in my early 30s (I was in my early 30s, by the way, until the minute I turned 35), I was one of the “young guns” — usually a lot younger than other broker-owners, or even most of the agents in my company.

So that’s kind of ended. I’m not the “young” guy anymore. My friends are all now younger than me, all people I met back when I didn’t have a kid and would go out more.  And even my new friends, the ones I’m generally making because we both have kids, are a lot younger, since they weren’t stupid enough to wait until their mid-40s to have them.

All that said, I’m coping okay. 45 is not a big landmark number.  The big birthdays are 18 (old enough to vote), 21 (old enough to drink), 30 (no longer a “young person”), 40 (starting mid-life), 65 (old enough to get social security),  90 (“I beat out 99% of the rest of you!”), and 100 (you get mentioned on the Today show by Willard Scott).

But anytime you hit a fairly round number you sort of think about where you are and where you’re going. By the time you’re 45, and have put more birthdays behind you than you’re likely to have in front of you, you realize that you’ve also probably experienced most of the big moments of your life: your graduation, getting married, having a kid, buying your first home.  Now, most of those big moments, those landmark milestones, are going to be experienced vicariously, through the people you love. You want to live long enough to see your kid graduate, your kid get married, your kid having a kid and making you a grandparent.

The consolation is that you get to take stock of where you are, and, hopefully, feel good about what you’ve already put in the book. I have a great wife, a beautiful kid, a a wonderful family, some great friends (who hopefully forgive me for pimping the BRAND NEW MOVE TO SUMA FACEBOOK PAGE), a good business, and a nice home.  So I have nothing really to complain about, other than the normal grousing about the flipping of the calendar.

So what am I doing to celebrate?  Absolutely nothing.  It doesn’t help that my birthday falls on Friday the 13th, which can’t be good.  But I don’t expect that we’re doing much of anything. My wife threw me a great surprise party for my 40th — a great dinner, then she got a bunch of tables in this great Meatpacking District club where we had about 40-50 come out to celebrate.  So my 40th birthday was basically a drunken bacchanal.

Now, a move to the suburbs, one dog, one kid, two SUVs later?  Nothing. If my wife is throwing me another surprise party, it would honestly be an ENORMOUS surprise, because all indications are that we’re both just too tired to do much of anything.  In fact, any actual party would be more of a big passive aggressive move by the wife, since we barely acknowledge her birthday two weeks ago, spending it, at all places, at a business conference of mine.  So if she throws me a party, I’m in trouble, because it would be more of a “see how much MORE I LOVE YOU than you love me” move than anything else.

And I don’t know that I could handle that, not when there’s a 99% chance that I’m halfway to the grave.