"The World I Grewed Up In Is Gone"

“Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.
"Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't -- take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment -- never see a trade is possible.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

 

[In] the knapsack’s pocket he found something he had left there: a small present, wrapped in paper. He dug it out.

It was the present he had had from Lily the day he had left Edgewood to come to the City to seek his fortune; a small present, wrapped in white paper. Open it when you think of it, she’d said.

…

It turned out to be a small machine of some sort. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for some time, turning it in his sticky and still trembling fingers, before he realized what it was: it was a pedometer. The handy kind that attaches to your belt and tells you, whenever you look at it, how far you’ve gone.

― John Crowley, Little, Big

 

“It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

 

I’ve always thought of the age of 60 as significant. I can also look forward to 63, the so-called grand climacteric, as something of a signpost. But so far 62 seems to be a great big nothingburger, just another dull marker on an increasingly rocky road. But, even so, Happy Birthday!