Like many of us, until my forties, I had gone through life feeling rather invincible. Not only was it inconceivable that something bad could ever happen to me, even my very mortality seemed suspect. Then, feeling creaks and aches in bones I hadn't thought about since anatomy class in medical school, made me reluctantly concede that I actually was mortal - or even worse - getting older. Yet, now that I've hit fifty, I've made an even more shocking discovery: I just don't care. I'm learning that there is so much that is surprisingly, gloriously, wondrously liberating about the half-century mark.

For example, what woman hasn't gone through life wishing she could just lose five or even ten pounds? At fifty, I just... don't... care! While I used to adhere to that universal female delusional calculus that calories don't count when snatched from a husband's plate, now, it's "Yes! I WILL have fries with that!"

Since I had gone low carb several years ago, the pounds had crept up again, largely because I started insisting on having a glass or two of wine with dinner. (An informal and utterly unscientific, but no less persuasive poll of my female contemporaries reveals that, for some reason, nightly wine with dinner seems to be a right of passage for middle-aged women unto itself. Maybe it's a manifestation of some highly advanced, merciful evolutionary accommodation. Kind of like spiders that inject their prey with paralyzing venom. If you were a bug, wouldn't you prefer to be eaten while unconscious in a coma rather than have your inevitable dismemberment occur while wide awake? Perhaps in the case of baby boomer women, the suddenly innate, undeniable thirst for a nightly nip also serves a humane purpose: that of anesthetizing us against the supposed pain involved in getting older.)