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As luck would have it, I turned forty today.  The traditional birthday question is, “what does it feel like to be forty?”  The answer, of course, is that there is a certain sense of mortality that sets in.  This is not because of an intellectual process, for example the end conclusion of a long introspection of the deeper questions of life.

Rather, things fall apart and one is constantly reminded in small and mundane ways that one is no longer on the upswing.  For example, this morning I woke up and stumbled groggily into the kitchen.  Seeking breakfast I reached into the refrigerator for the orange juice.  I remembered that I had bought it just yesterday.  And it was the kind with pulp.  Some pulp, specifically.  As you age, you get set in your ways. You no longer seek new things, but rather you seek to become more comfortable with what you have.

Having achieved some success in life, you can begin to enjoy the physical things that make life easier.  For example, my refrigerator is a double-door, stainless steel model.  The juice is Tropicana, specifically the kind with “some pulp”.  Not “pulp free” and not “lots of pulp”.  I like “some pulp”, and it has become important in my life to get it.  And to put it in my stainless steel, double-door refrigerator.

I gave the juice a vigorous shake.  I was proud of myself.  Even at forty I have the strength to shake a half gallon of orange juice single-handed.  Long pumping motions of the arm.  An abrupt, forceful reversal at each end of the stroke.  Even in the fog of morning I remembered that the pulpy bits settle to the bottom, and that I don’t like this, and that I need to shake the box.  Heck, I even remembered that I had bought orange juice the night before.  Doing just fine, I was.  That is, until orange juice sprayed all over the kitchen.  Only when I looked down at the box did I realize that it didn’t have the cap on.

Yes, it had been a vigorous shake.  And as I surveyed the kitchen, the counter, the floor, the cabinets, the wall, and the whole left side of the refrigerator, I slowly remembered why there was no cap.  The night before I had gone to the corner grocery store to buy it along with some other groceries.  Somewhere along the way in putting the groceries away I opened the juice and poured a glass.  When it came time to put things into the refrigerator I discovered that the orange juice cap was nowhere to be found.  And of course, there came a time, because when you are forty your life has become an economy of optimized motions, and so everything that was headed for the refrigerator was headed in at the same time, in contrast to the frenetic motions of a 26-year-old moving first here and then there and then back again.

Where was it?  I had no idea.  What had I been doing just a minute ago?  Surely I hadn’t bought a box of orange juice without a cap.  I was baffled.  I had no memory at all of uncapping the box, of setting the cap down somewhere, or of anything related to the cap.  Well, I put that bothersome thought out of my mind.  This would be no problem.  I would simply have to remember that the box of orange juice had no cap.

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