Dr. Oliver Sacks gave me a gift for my birthday some years ago: a writing prompt that I use each year for my special-ish day: Write an essay in which you equate your age with the corresponding element number on the periodic table.

Since I am a nonscientist, this seemed like an invitation to a find a metaphor in a reflection of the year past and in one’s hopes for the year to come.

Today, November 18, 2023, I am 55. A Scorpio, whatever that means. A dear friend composed my birth chart a couple years ago and informed me that I am a “double Scorpio,” which sounds neat and intense, and my ego-driven side (in other words, all of me) hopes that this makes me sound mysterious and sexy, but it just means that both the sun and moon were in the same sign at the moment of my debut on life’s stage. To my non-astrology believing ears it just sounds like “double thing I double don’t believe in.” The periodic table as the source for an annual metaphor about one’s age, though? I fully endorse this exercise.

Of course, Dr. Sacks did not give this present to ME; it was in a July 2015 New York Times essay titled, “My Periodic Table.” (Link; subscription required.) One of his final essays (he died in August that year at age 82), it was a gift for everyone:

At one end of my writing table, I have element 81 in a charming box, sent to me by element-friends in England: It says, “Happy Thallium Birthday,” a souvenir of my 81st birthday last July; then, a realm devoted to lead, element 82, for my just celebrated 82nd birthday earlier this month. […] Next to the circle of lead on my table is the land of bismuth […] Bismuth is element 83. I do not think I will see my 83rd birthday, but I feel there is something hopeful, something encouraging, about having “83” around. Moreover, I have a soft spot for bismuth, a modest gray metal, often unregarded, ignored, even by metal lovers. My feeling as a doctor for the mistreated or marginalized extends into the inorganic world and finds a parallel in my feeling for bismuth.—Oliver Sacks, “My Periodic Table.”

My year just past, 54, corresponds to xenon, which I described thus: “It was difficult to find at first, suspected to exist, but it took its 19th Century discoverers quite a bit of work to isolate it. So its discoverers, Sir William Ramsay and Morris Travers, chose the Greek word, ‘xenos,’ meaning ‘stranger’ as inspiration for its name. … The uses for which xenon finds its value are for things that we did not know we would ever need to do or ever be able to do until we discovered xenon. All of my experiences this year may all be work to find something whose worth I do not yet know how to measure or even notice, but after this year may prove to be incredibly valuable.”

Today, I am 55. I leave my late-early-mid-50s and arrive in the middle-middle-middle-50s. Element 55 is “caesium, or in America, “cesium.” The Latin word “caesius” means “bluish gray,” and since its compounds burn blue, this was the name chosen. There is something bluish-gray and thus foggy about how this element possesses several official names in several official spellings. Wikipedia: “In medieval and early modern writings ‘caesius’ was spelled with the ligature æ as ‘cæsius’; hence, an alternative but now old-fashioned orthography is ‘cæsium.'” Cæsium, caesium, cesium. Desistium already.

Is there something especially foggy about 55, something so precise (multiple spellings) that it yields to imprecision? We will find out in the fullness of time.

Part of cesium’s use is precision, though. One of its isotopes, cesium-133, gives our atomic clocks their super-spectacular precision. The internet and our cell phones tap into a system that has cesium-133 at its heart. In 2018, cesium-133 was used to redefine the second, yet more precisely (“one Mississippi” is not as exact as you think it is).

There is something both foggy and precise about one’s inner clock at age 55. I know how long 55 years takes to pass as I am now something of an expert in the field. Yet it goes by so quickly (snaps fingers). Last Tuesday, I was 14. A week before that, I was 25. My late father, as Alzheimer’s started to make itself more pronounced in his inner world, used to grow puzzled and almost show despair that 1942 no longer existed, that he wouldn’t be able to have dinner tonight at the farm in Vermont with his (late) brothers and parents. This is a near-emotion that I think I share with my dad, even though I do not think I have Alzheimer’s. It has long bothered me very slightly that it is easier for me to travel to Scranton, Pennsylvania, than to 1979, to pick a random long-ago year; I’ve been to both, and—nothing against Scranton!—I’d like to see 1979 again.

That’s 55. Each year I’ve lived is available to me with the cesium-133 super-specificity that a person’s emotion often carries—our Fitchett Bros. milk box was silver, our rotary phone was green, the third step down into the basement creaked—is full of particular colors thanks to the often-incorrect precision of memory. But it’s bluish-gray and you can spell cesium three different ways (was our phone green?): nothing is ever perfectly knowable, one just gets closer and closer to truths, never THE truth.

THE truth is that life is love. One can measure life with such precision that every so often the definition of a second can be tightly refined; and one can never measure love. It has a bunch of spellings and it is blue-ISH and gray-ISH and red-ISH and has at least 55 different ways to express it. At least.

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Mark Aldrich is a journalist, award-winning humor columnist, and writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, now in its thirty-second season:

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