July 29, 2040, this date which is currently three decades in the future, will be smack-dab in the middle of my 50th year of life. While at times I like to think that turning thirty is when you enter into "being old" I have come to accept that even I will be forced to age. Fifty however is a number that I still refuse to swallow; I instead like to focus on where I will be when I am thirty five. But for the sake of the year 2040 lets step into that year for a minute. By then I would like to be well established in my career, a career that has yet to be settled on as of July 29, 2010. Let’s take one of my possible careers and dream upon that. So, July 29, 2040, I will (in theory) be a journalist working in the field of some far off country. I will be writing about the culture, the food, the people, and the lives of some group of indigenous people, be it the Parisians on the Champs Elysees, or members of an African tribe deep in the heart of Kenya. Since Samantha Jones says 50 is the new 40 I will also be planning my second career as the editor of some local news paper in central Kentucky. We’ll say Danville. By that time I will have two children who will be attending high school at Sayer or Lexington Christian Academy in Lexington and I will spend my late nights reading the New Yorker, drinking some fancy tea that I’ve bought in Paris, and writing handwritten letters to those Ohio Countians who have inspired me to live out this dream. These I’m sure will be the same people that in 2010 give me the ideas for these columns, and are the ones who inspire me to dream such lofty dreams. This summer I have learned and experienced so much about our county and I have in turn learned a lot about myself and where I want to go and who I want to be after I leave the county in three short years. When I take these times late at night to reflect back on what I have learned this summer, and what I have learned in my twenty short years in Ohio County there are names that continually come to mind. These are the people that have made Ohio County home for me and have made it a place that continually causes me to struggle with the concept of returning or leaving post UK. In the next couple weeks will be stepping away from exploring the county, instead stepping into the past and reliving my days as a student of Ohio County Schools –yes I realize I only graduated two years ago. For me many of the people who have had the biggest impact in my life have been teachers. I suppose it helps that my mom is a retired teacher and I grew up surrounded by her friends, many of which are also teachers. As OCS go back to school this coming week I figured it would be an appropriate time to relive those years. The three that I look up most to are Pam Bradley, Scott Ford, and Randy Brown.
50 year old Ben sounds like someone I will want to know.
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