New 25-year-old seeks respect, pity … something

Melissa Schorr

Tuesday, June 3, 1997 | 11:32 a.m.

It took weeks to persuade an old high school pal that turning 25 was the last hurrah of youth, a Big Deal, and one that could only be properly honored with wads of money dropped and liters of alcohol consumed.

"It'll be like turning 21 all over again!" I promised, and incredibly enough, this convinced him.

Swept up in the magnitude of the occasion, he dialed up a night on the town, complete with stretch limo. We marked the quarter-century turn by feting him with gifts, toasting his health, and staggering home at an ungodly hour.

But after it took one too many weeks to fully recover, I reconsidered. Perhaps my own day of reckoning required a gesture of maturity instead.

I even had the perfect solution: After years of friends treating me to birthday dinners, I swore that on my 25th birthday, I would pick up the check.

It would be a display of largess, of my newfound independent means.

Ah, the folly of my youth.

For only now, on the cusp of my own quarter-century -- and just like last year, I'm still flat broke -- can I see how misguided I was. I've come to the realization that turning 25 will have absolutely no significance.

My mother assures me that 25 is the start of all good things to come. But the only thing I figure will immediately change in my life is now I can finally rent a car from Alamo instead of Rent-a-Wreck.

And besides Mom and Geico auto insurance, no one else seems to give it any credence as a significant milestone. Only at the acknowledged markers -- 18 and 21 -- do you get a hearty welcome into the horrors of adulthood.

Eighteen-year-olds get to face their mortality in all sorts of thrilling ways -- pondering the return of the draft, their eligibility for the electric chair, or simply boring themselves to death by finally having to follow presidential primaries.

Twenty-one-year-olds spiral downward into the depressing reality that everything they had been longing to do for years and now can -- staying up past Letterman, somersaulting off sofas -- quickly loses its appeal.

Turning 25 only brings about age dissonance, days when some mall chicks choose to call me "Ma'am" when asking for the time, and nights when some chippy cocktail waitress, probably younger than I am, demands to see my ID.

At least those who turn 30 get genuine sympathy.

Try turning 25 and insisting that you too have gray hair and need midafternoon naps, that you can remember back when stamps cost 19 cents, and that you could use a midlife crisis. You'll be greeted with looks of disgust or pity.

And yet 25, a friend points out, also means that he can no longer be the wunderkind -- the one of whom everyone is jealous for succeeding at such a sickeningly young age. You must force Tiger Woods and Ruth Shalit out of your mind and focus long-term. It's time to think Georgia O'Keefe and Grandma Moses.

Twenty-five is perched upon on the hairbreadth span between youth and adulthood, not able to convince either group that you belong -- and not sure which group you want to join.

Twenty-five sets off to collect all the trappings of adulthood -- a set of wine glasses, a Frequent Flyer membership, a fully stocked medicine cabinet -- but then invariably decides that quitting a job to take a four-week cross-country road trip in a car without air conditioning sounds like a dandy plan.

Then again, maybe that is its charm: 25 may be the last time to simultaneously breathe in from two atmospheres: the child's gasp that "anything is possible," the adult's sigh that "this is it."