Half a Life

By the time your Thanksgiving turkey turns up, this faithful correspondent will have turned fifty years old. Yes, this November the list of things time’s passage has bestowed upon me—in addition to gray hair, reading glasses, and teenaged children—expands to include AARP eligibility, a new aversion to sudden loud noises, and having magically become invisible to members of the opposite sex. Not that any of these (except maybe the reading glasses) is necessarily a bad thing. I imagine most of them—like AARP membership—come with some benefits. It’s just going to take a while to learn to appreciate them properly.

You won’t catch me complaining though, because until about 1900 my average life expectancy as a male of the species wouldn’t have been more than about fifty years. But thanks to the advancements in hygiene, nutrition, medicine, and hair care products that twentieth century civilization was kind enough to develop before I came along, I and my Generation X brethren should be able to look forward to at least as many years of annoying our children as our parents have enjoyed. The only question is whether we’ll succeed in going more or less gentle into that long good night. As I write this, my father, who is just months shy of his eightieth birthday, is halfway through an ale-and-anti-inflammatories-fueled walking tour of South Wales. And sticking with the Dylan Thomas references, even if my mother-in-law, Dorcas, isn’t quite “burning and raving at close of day,” she’s not going gentle anywhere, if all the croquet, mahjongg, tai-chi, interpretive dance, and other activities she’s taken up since retiring are any indication. Still, I can’t help but recall the summer, sometime in Dorcas’s early fifties, when she broke her nose twice—once while water-skiing barefoot, and the other while attempting a backwards somersault off a diving board. By all means rage, rage against the dying of the light. Just wait for Medicare to kick in first.

Turning fifty also sets me squarely in the middle of Country Roads’ reader demographic, which according to our readership surveys ranges between about thirty-five and sixty. That’s interesting because this year also marks twenty-five years that Ashley and I have worked on Country Roads. Half a life, in other words. Back when we moved to Louisiana and began working for the magazine Dorcas launched in 1983 to celebrate the events, attractions, people, and places of rural Mississippi and Louisiana, we were younger than most of the readers we were writing for. In the years since, while we’ve been busy growing older, the magazine’s subject matter has come a long way. Country Roads now covers more of the art, music, literature, outdoor adventuring, and culinary subject matter that is of interest to us and the people we hang out with. Ironically, during a period in which the explosion of digital, mobile media has forced those of us in the publishing business to think very hard about what makes our publications valuable, I’ve seen the reach and appeal of Country Roads, and the approach to life it reflects, grow relevant to a broader range of readers than at any time before. Anecdotally, I hear from many readers younger than me, who despite having grown up on the spoils of the digital age, find their enthusiasm for Louisiana’s unique culture to be somehow better served by a thoughtfully curated, well-written, handsomely illustrated physical magazine, than by a disembodied stream of digital content. That’s largely due to the work of our team of (talented, literate, culturally engaged) contributors, most of whom are closer to the age Ashley and I were when we started in this business, than the age we are now. You might say that as we’ve gotten older our magazine has gotten younger. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur. Or maybe, when you’re pushing fifty and have twenty-five years of magazine publishing to look back on, hindsight just makes it look that way.