Getting Old

An old friend ( read: lover) is expecting a baby this week. I suppose there is nothing that solidifies the fact that we are getting old like this sort of event. I check periodically to see if the event has occured. I think, somewhere, in the back of my brain, I have concluded that until it happens, I am allowed to be 19 forever.
Surprisingly, the last 11 years have passed extremely quickly for me. Recalling things that happened immediately post-high school are quite the same as recalling last month.
At one time, I laid in bed well past socially accepted norm with this man, surmising the hilarity of those who woke up before the sun. We debated things like astrology, and "partied like rock stars" , and yet we are both facing a reality that encompasses all we believed to be surreal at one time. If we still spoke, I would wish him well, and envision nurseries and baby clothes. But in fact, I will never be able to see him as someone other than someone who sobbed to Metallica, thought of lions as idols, and who walked the ASU campus with me in the early hours before an exam, believing that grades were the epitome of a successful adult life.
Is this how is it as a grown up? Expecting that time has stopped as we grow old, and that each individual who left an indelible imprint on our lives had remained as we remember them? As senility descends, and we enter our "second" childhood, is it not totally expected and realistic that we would put ourselves in a time where our responsibilities are trivial, and our youth seems eternal? I remember listening to the Fugees, while driving in the car given so generously to my college roommate, by her parents, and thinking that life was eternal, and georgeous. The palm trees swayed with the music, and, my young hands waved out the window with the music, and there were so few scars to deal with....and yet, now, I have become this adult, who has a plate of reality to deal with, when sometimes, all I want to do is escape into the silly world in which I once inhabited.
Good luck, Ryan, on the adventure into which you are embarking. I wish you nothing but the best, and while you hold your baby girl, may you feel nothing but the moment. They will move quickly, my old friend. And soon, she will be wandering the campus, feeling foreign breezes on her face...knowing her own invincibility, and yet kniwing that each passing moment is one in which to delight...and despair. Such is life...such is adulthood. I can only wish for her, and for my own children, the time when eating at 2am in IHOP is delicious and unsacrificable.