Dr. Oliver Sacks gave me a gift for my birthday some years ago: a writing prompt that I use each year for my birthday 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, 2024, I am 56. A Scorpio, whatever that means. In fact, 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.”

Today, I am 56. I leave the equator of my mid-50s and arrive in the later-middle-50s. Slightly later. My later-middle-mid-50s.

Element 56 is barium. Anyone aged 56 and up does not want to even hear the word “barium” much less learn more about it for gastroenterological reasons if none other. The large number of applications in which barium plays a small but essential role can lead one to think of barium as an element that humans have known about and employed for millennia, yet it was only discovered in stages in the 18th Century because it was difficult to isolate with the technology available at the time. Once discovered, uses started to appear, from paint making to ceramics manufacturing to oil drilling to its use as a radiocontrast in X-ray imaging.

One chemical company’s website describes barium as “an underdog on the periodic table.” Not THE underdog, “an underdog,” one of many. No one cheers for barium.

No one says much about 56, either. I am unaware of any songs devoted to this age, unless all the songs in which the singer ponders life in the September of one’s years are about a period of life that will begin around, well, today for me. At 56 one knows that most of the years of one’s life are underdog years. Essential things may be learned, and then, later, only later, one may reflect that one learned that essential thing around now.

56 may be a barium year.

* * * *
In Paul Auster’s diary of his sixty-fourth year, Winter Journal, Auster recounts a moment in which the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant tells him solemnly, “Paul, at fifty-seven I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.” Auster wrote that he was confused by the remark but that because it seemed important to Trintignant to tell him this, he did not ask the actor to clarify. He wrote that as he entered his sixties, the comment came to appear true in its own way for him.

In Trintignant’s schema, I have one more year until I feel old, which will be followed by the youth of old age several years later.

My 50s have been event-filled, but most were not events that implied the need of an exclamation point, like a graduation. With the exception of deaths of loved ones and friends, the day-to-day has occupied the majority of my days, luckily.

I experience more realizations than events. I saw a photograph the other day of a party that I was at in 2006 and I realized that I have no memory of the sweater that is on me in the photo. I do not remember how thick it was, what it felt like, whether or not it was new or old or if I liked it. I do not remember if it was a gift or one that I purchased. Up until this week, I thought that I remember each and every article of clothing I’ve ever owned, because I have specific recollections about all (well, MANY) of them, things like “this necktie was easy to tie,” or “this shirt always sat weird on my shoulders.” This paragraph is, I think, an example of me feeling old like Trintignant-via-Auster tried to describe it. In one moment I feel the onrush of questions about my memory, the reliability of said memory, the happy realization that my taste in clothes has improved, and the revelation that I can delete some more minor myths that I tell myself about myself, like the idea that I remember every sweater or shirt or whatever that I’ve ever worn. It’s a small event with a large-ish insight: I do not know how many myths of myself I live with, but I’ve lived long enough to know that I get to drop each one that I find. This age is a useful one.

Trintignant died at age 91 in June 2022. Paul Auster died in April 2024, at age 77. I get to be 56 today.

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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-fourth season:

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