"What are we listening to? Is this your music?!? Tom, you're so old..."
I love these comments. I treasure them. I revel in them.
I've had a string of trainees at work who are young enough that I probably could have had them in class when I was teaching at the high school. I have enough new music on my playlist that they're cool with me playing DJ at work, but then I bust out with some early Panic! At the Disco or My Chemical Romance and the trainee tells Old Man Lutes that they haven't heard this song in forever... So when Hendrix and the Stones come up in the queue, they think I inherited this mix tape from Jesus himself, when he was doing his emcee thang...
But it's all a joke. I find it very entertaining that I have apparently achieved "old" status at work. But I don't feel old. When I turned 30, I actually told people that I still felt like I was speeding up.
Do you know what makes me feel old?
When I look back on the past couple years of working in EMS, and realize that the COVID pandemic hasn't even been 12 months yet...
When I remember that it wasn't even a year ago that I was ordered to carry a loaded rifle down Lake Street...
When I realize that I've already lost friends and family while one job of mine or the other has demanded that I keep going; one more step, one more patient...
When the exhaustion of always being on alert starts to seep into my bones and I feel the burden of my own weight...
When I think of everything we have endured, and the weariness starts to settle behind my eyes...
Maybe I can forget again how old I am if I just crank the music up another notch or two.
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