The Humbling Effects Of Turning 51
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Beachgoers packed the shoreline at Orange Beach, Ala., last weekend, with umbrellas and chairs stretching as far as the eye could see.
DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
I took a few days off last week and the wife and I headed to Orange Beach. I guess you could call it a birthday trip since it happened to fall on my 51st birthday.
In years past, if we ventured down to the Alabama Gulf Coast, we always waited until mid-August when school was back in session and there were fewer people around.
Wow.
I felt like an ant in a line of ants.
Traffic everywhere. Lines at restaurants. And I have never seen so many people on the beach, rows of people stretching for miles along the ocean. The beach crowd didn’t bother me too much. My thinking is that the more folks there are in the water, the less likely a shark is to bite me.
I enjoy playing in the ocean and spent a fair amount of time in the water. The second day we were there, the sandbar, or that place where the water gets shallow again after you go out a ways, had some wicked waves.
I took a float out there and waited on the big ones in water that ranged from knee-deep to waist-deep. With good timing, it was a great ride and, for a little while, I felt half my age. But age has a funny way of sneaking up on you. This time, reality arrived in the form of a sunburn.
Now, when it comes to the sun, I’m pretty careful. I’m not one to sit on the beach soaking up rays. I prefer a chair under an umbrella. After getting a little more sun than intended the first day, I wore a long-sleeve swim shirt, along with sunglasses, a visor and plenty of sunscreen.
After two days of playing in the ocean, I woke up one morning and noticed the top of my noggin was sore.
“That’s funny,” I thought. “I haven’t bumped my head on anything.”
You guessed it.
My head was sunburned.
The visor I have worn for years at the beach obviously wasn’t protecting the top of my head.
That was a little dose of reality.
For most of my life, I had enough hair that too much sun on top of my head was never something I worried about. And I’m the kind of fellow who tries to squeeze an extra week out of every haircut now that they cost 20 bucks, so it had been a while since my last one.
Apparently, at 51, there is just a little less up there than there used to be.
