Twenty-one is an extremely arbitrary age.
The stroke of midnight upon my twenty-first birthday found me in Asheville, washing dishes with Vincent, so that my exhausted family and friends (we had come in from Charlotte that afternoon) could could go to bed at a slightly-respectable hour. And really, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Saturday, my birthday, we went hiking on the parkway and finished the evening with a wonderful dinner of serf-and-turf with a good bottle of wine.
Now, it is true that all of my friends happen to be younger then me by at least a few months. But still, I think it beat an evening in a smoky, loud bar, followed by a night hunched over a toilet. But the point is, today my sister was in Charlotte and she took me and Vincent out to lunch. I ordered a a drink for the first time. Yuengling, to be precise. And it was quite delicious, with my pub hamburger, dressed all the way with cheese and bacon… While the event was fun, yummy, and quite thrilling to sit there, boldly with a beer in my hand, the experience was shockingly arbitrary. I am twenty-one. Thus I can drink. Regardless of my personal responsibility or intelligence, I am deemed worthy of drinking myself under the table. If I so desire.
It is true, the fact that became a legal adult at age eighteen yet have been unable to buy a glass of wine when I go on a date has always bothered me. To think that young men can be drafted to give their lives for our country but cannot legally enjoy a beer seems… counterintuitive, to say the least. But the true arbitrary nature of the magical number 21 never fully impressed me until today, handing the waitress my license and thinking: wow, I am so NOT more grown up then eight days ago. It’s just a little piece of bitter irony to pucker my sense of justice.
Don’t get me wrong, I love having a bottle of merlot displayed on my bookshelf, flanked by zany wine-glasses my art-major-friend present to me. It’s just that, privileges are things to be earned, you know? Drinking is definitely a privilege. But I didn’t do anything to earn it. My mother just happened to give birth to me twenty-one-years-and-eight-days ago. And that is wonderful: I’m extremely grateful that she endured eight hours of hard labor to bring me into the world and then raised me in a loving home. She deserves some good Four Roses bourbon on the rocks. But me? I happened to turned twenty-one.
