My mom is telling me about getting older. She's detailing the effects of age on skin and hair and figures.

"It sucks," she's saying.

I guess.

I drove my car straight into a tree and ran head-on into Christmas. It wasn't so bad. I didn't get hurt or anything. I locked the keys inside, and someone from the fire department had to come and open the door for me. That was the worst part.

"So you ran it off the road, then locked yourself out of it?"

"Um, yeah."

Twelve or so years of sweet and sour disillusionment behind me, and I wished there was someone at the North Pole who took rush delivery postcards.

"How is your wife?" mine would say. "Everything is still jolly, I hope. This year I'd like a new radiator pan and a paint job, if it's not too much trouble."

My naughty versus nice scorecard was pretty mixed this year, anyway. I might have at least received a coal-powered car, though.

A week padded by, a little slower on foot. The whole sky was white and felt like waiting. The ball dropped in Times Square and another year flip-flopped over. Some girl was talking to me about my sweater. I was making a little tin-foil pyramid out of candy wrappers. I was half-watching the TV, and I swear Dick Clark looked just a little bit older this year. That couple of moments always seems so inflated and special. It never really matters what's actually happening - it always seems kind of magical when something so abstract changes so suddenly.

Another week with bluer skies, and I flip-flopped from 19 to 20.

("Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain ·")

An old flame dropped by with an old torch and asked for some kerosene and a match. I told him I was out and offered him some tea. We talked for a little while, caught up on things, then I walked him halfway to his car. I guess I've gained a little wisdom.

("With the barkers and the colored balloons ·")

That night I dreamed that I had married young Paul Simon. When I saw him from a distance, I realized that he was a munchkin.

"I'm older than I once was," I hummed to myself the next day in the bath, "and younger than I will be; that's not unusual."

("You can't be 20 on Sugar Mountain.")

"I'm rolling over a decade this year," I told a one-night-only best friend back in July. "I'm thinking about it a lot, how it's the end and beginning of things."

"Did you think about that before you turned 10?" she asked.

I had better things to do when I was 10.

("Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon ...")

My dad sent me a birthday letter.

"Welcome to your life," it says. The "your" is underlined.

"It isn't the James Dean, 'die young, leave a good corpse,'" it goes on, "but 'live long, leave a good story.'"

He gives me the rundown on turning 20, 30, 40 then 50.

"I still love it all," he says. "The wear and tear is a bitch - take care of yourself."

I'm not thinking about it so much anymore. I'm finding that I have better things to do.

"It isn't strange that after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same," I was humming while the dirty water ran down the drain. "After changes we are more or less the same."

("You're leaving there too soon.")

My mom is telling me what it's like to get older. I'm trying to figure out how to eat a sandwich without making chewing sounds into the phone. I'm hoping that she'll slip up and tell me about every man she's ever loved and why she took this path or that road. I'm thinking about telling her that none of it's lost. That developmental theory says that we go on from stage to stage and leave the last one behind, but that just isn't true. The theory states that our personalities are like advancing armies, and we leave troops behind to fight our battles and never turn back around to get them. That we carry it all with us, all the triumphs and defeats and songs around the songs around all the campfires.

It's about how I'm six and 16 and at the same time I'm 20.

"It sucks," she's saying. "My hair keeps going gray."