“Dont look back, you can never look back.” -- Don Henley

By RAY WADDLE

Ah, 1996. Who can forget such a year of national surplus, when gas was $1.39 a gallon, angel books were the rage, Mideast terrorism was just a think-tank theory. And I turned 40.

A decade later, Seinfeldian frivolity yields to 24-7 hazard and worry. The nation’s in a sour slump of war, debt and diabetes. The personal math doesn’t help either: in September, I hit 50.

How to act one’s age? Consulting the Bible, I find few models for the newly arriving 50-something. Most everyone there is 33, or 133. Apostle Paul is an exception. In my younger, more distracted days, he always sounded impossibly old, writing world-shaking epistles from his dark prison cell. But in fact he lived into his mere 50s, a bearded man on a mission, no time to waste -- suddenly a baby boomer compatriot waiting to be rediscovered with fresh eyes and bifocals.

A world of celebrities turns 50 this year too -- Mel Gibson, Kenny G, Tom Hanks, Bo Derek, Dwight Yoakam, Sinbad, Gumby. I’m not privy to their party plans and strategies. No doubt theyre intensely interesting. But with age comes skepticism about pop culture’s non-stop distractions. Life gets drop-dead serious. Mortality makes house calls: the phone rings with the news about a friend, a cousin, a parent. Celebrities just retreat into their money or addictions, no help to the rest of us.

My skepticism spreads to official trends in truth and fear. Live long enough, and the media becomes a frantic blur of interchangeable, forgettable bulletins. One year, the TV anchors declared our enemies were radon gas, carjackings and underground satanic conspiracies. Soon enough, each was quietly shelved in turn. Now, the monsters are transfats, porous borders and activist judges.

And, indefinitely, terrorism.

Life was simpler in 96. The religious trends were megachurches and the occasional suicide cult, little gangs dreaming of riding a comet and dying serenely in the beds, snug in their Nikes. Today it’s still megachurches and suicide cults, only the cults declare themselves hell-bent on global mass martyrdom for us all.

At least middle-age offers a little reckless freedom from convention. I trust the Gospels over Wikipedia, Justin Martyr over Justin TImberlake. I’d rather stay home and put on Ella Fitzgerald than defend my fellow boomers’ incessant spiritual mutations. In successive decades, without embarrassment, we made Jesus a Che Guevara look-alike, a Texas Republican, a buddy, a bully, a Buddha, a rapture-ready regent, lately a gnostic family man with a villa in France.

So I accept 50 as the shimmering gateway to new aches and pains and principled crankiness.

I hate cell phones in libraries, SUVs idling at recycle bins, the laugh track on Friends. Any laugh track.

Give me weekly communion, Neil Young, Julie Christie, Louis Armstrong, the state fair, George Frederich Handel, the mute button.

I lift up studies declaring coffee is good for you. I avoid studies declaring coffee is bad for you.

Outrun the midcentury mark, and you learn four things: suffering is certain, holiness is real, everyone on earth just wants one thing: a little respect. The fourth thing I’m sure I’ll remember momentarily.

Ray Waddle can be reached at ray@raywaddle.com.