Age, Where Is Thy Sting?

Here's the story of the shock I received last week. We have a home freezer in the little room off the kitchen. When I label items for the freezer I write the name of the food (cooked kabocha squash, for example) and the date on a slip of paper. Well, a torn half of a Library of Congress card, if you really want to know (of which we still have, after 35 years, 10 boxes). I then insert a corner of the paper between the plastic container and its lid.

 

When I write the date on this card, I put just month and year. In the olden days, when the first two digits of the year were one and nine, I could simply scrawl "Mar 96." But once the century changed, I found it necessary to add an apostrophe so that the date reads "Mar '10". Otherwise the numerals for the year can be mis-read as the numerals for a day—i.e., March 10—with no indication of the year.

 

Have you followed this so far? Well, last week I realized that this annoyance—having to add the extra little stroke of the apostrophe—is not going to go away any time soon. In the back of my unthinking mind was the expectation that in a year or two I'd be able to do without the apostrophe. My moment of revelation came when I looked the situation squarely in the face and had to admit that I will not be free of that apostrophe until the year 2032. That is to say, every year until then could be—if I failed to add the apostrophe—misconstrued as a day of the month rather than a year. For freezer clarity, I will be adding that apostrophe until 2032.

 

That's 20 years from now! Twenty years in which anything at all can happen but at the end of which I will incontestably be 20 years older than I am now. As I write this, I find myself stringing out my sentences, adding phrases, using two or even four words when one would do, in a vain attempt to avoid putting this down: I will be, in 2032, 95 years old. Good grief!

 

Oh, come now. There's no need to be dramatic. But the fact is, if I want to reach the point at which I no longer have to add the apostrophe to the dating of my freezer foods, I will have to stick around until I am 95. Given how much that apostrophe annoys me, I think it will probably be worth it--assuming that I still have a house, a freezer, and a room off the kitchen to put it in, when I am 95.

 

 

Copyright 2013 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com