I only recently took down the collection of holiday cards – the last vestige of Christmas. And the least visually/physically intrusive.

It seems that I didn’t read the cards closely enough as I was hanging them up: one of them caught my eye. It was from a friend of a friend with whom I’d hung out multiple times… but we’ve since lost touch.

Her card was a photo of her entire family: herself, her spouse, her two children. And there was a cheery holiday message at the bottom, followed by their names and respective ages.

And she is TWENTY SEVEN! This was deeply surprising to me, because, as apparently I do, I had just assumed she was Exactly My Age. To find out she is seven years younger was quite startling.

Why did I think she was my age? I guess because we are both at the same stage of life: family, young kids. Although I now realize I thought that she might even be older than I am, by a couple of years, because her kids are several years older than mine is.

It’s completely silly, you know, to assume that everyone goes around having their first child at age 32. And in fact I DON’T assume that, normally; if you were to ask me what the typical age of childbirth is, I’d probably say something like… 27 or 28. And even that is based on Nothing Remotely Related to Fact or Research or Knowledge. Just a pure guess out of thin air.

Maybe I thought she was my age because she is so mature? But that’s again kind of a ridiculous thing, considering that maturity has really nothing to do with age. I know plenty of people on both ends of the spectrum: twenty-three-year-olds who are wise and self-assured and knowledgable beyond their years and fifty-five-year-olds who could be fourth-graders on the maturity index.

I think it’s just that I’m self-centered, and view the world very narrowly through my own particular perspective, and so assume that people in the same stage of life as I am must be my age.

Or maybe there comes a point when you just can’t tell anymore. I feel like I’ve reached the stage where everyone age 13 to 21 looks pretty much the same, and everyone over a certain point in their 20s to, say, age 50 or so looks about the same. Or if not the same, in some middling range of uncertainty where I would be just as satisfied to learn someone was 25 as to learn they were 48. I mean, Jennifer Lopez. She can’t be a day over 27, right?