Getting old...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) I tell a story about how back when I was in like sixth grade, this one teacher used to get the same gift for every teacher who turned 40: a nice bouquet of flowers, arranged in a Metamucil bottle.

And, after I tell that story, I realize that I'm well older than that age, now.

Also, when Brian Wilson dies, I text the news to a college friend with whom I had seen his first concert tour after completing Smile, and I say that I'm glad we went, and my friend texts back --

That's been 20 years now!

2) Because my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker turned 30 earlier that week, I make many jokes about that, the next shift that I work with her.

Like, she walks by, and I'm like, "Can you hear that, can you hear that," and when people say what, I say that I hear bones creaking.

(She then says to me, too, that I'm older than her, so my bones should be creaking, and I say that they do, and that's exactly why I'm sensitive to the changes happening in her.) 

And, I tell her that she should get a new pair of glasses, because she didn't pour eggroll sauce in the little take-out cups, but rather cleaning fluid (it wasn't; it was just a bad joke, and one, incidentally, that didn't land well).

And, when she says that she's tired and has a migraine and wants to leave work, at first I say she should just walk out the door and leave and not tell anyone, since if our one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones can just not show up to work without calling, she can just walk out the door anytime she wants, without telling anyone.

But then, upon further reflection, I change my joke, and I say that since she had her birthday, she has to be in bed by eight o'clock now, and that's why she needs to leave.

Once, too, I call her "Pi [her first name]," which really catches her off-guard and makes her laugh in a slightly confused way.

("Pi" is what you call someone who's older than you in [Thai], and it's what she calls me since I'm older than her, and there's no possible way on earth I can call her "Pi"). 

3) When I go to clear a patio table, there's a napkin stuffed in the umbrella-hole at the center of the table, and I think back to a story that is told of me as a toddler, where I was at a family dinner and standing on someone's lap and I started getting really weirdly woozy for some reason, and my grandmother realized I was staring at the big ham-bone that was in the center of the ham and drained of marrow, and so she stuck a napkin into the end of the bone so that I couldn't see it anymore, which worked, since I couldn't see it anymore, and so I stopped being woozy.

I'm not old enough to remember that, but it's been told of me, and my grandmother has been dead over twenty-five years now.