The Big 3-0

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

My eldest daughter, Shana, turns thirty today. Those of you who remember my carrying her around in an infant backpack at conventions can feel suitably old now.

PAD

44 comments on “The Big 3-0”

  1. .
    Tell her to enjoy the last enjoyable “0” she’ll have for all it’s worth. Don’t know how those things changed so much. Loved turning 20. Thought that 30 was awesome. I still can’t get my mind to recognize that I passed the 40 mark without weeping.

    2. I just turned 30 on the 2nd… it felt… well it felt like all the other birthdays. but i did point out to my mom that her eldest is 30… and she pointed out that my younger brother is 28 and i’ve been out of college for almost 10 years… tables turned pretty fast on that covo… haha.

    3. You just need a different attitude toward birthdays, Jerry. I think of each birthday as marking another year the universe hasn’t managed to kill me, despite some pretty imaginative attempts over the years.
      .
      In 2013, I’ll have managed to dodge the Angel of Death for 50 consecutive years, which I think is one heck of an accomplishment – wish me luck! 🙂

      1. This reminds me of the words of the immortal George Carlin, who once said “Every day I break my own record for consecutive number of days I’ve been alive.”

      2. Ah, fifty. That magical age for a man where medical science suddenly becomes obsessed with your rectum. Let’s check that prostate and schedule that colonoscopy…
        .
        PAD

      3. Good luck. We’re all counting on you.
        .
        M’self, I was born in 1961 – but after the really bad year I had in 1997, I’ve been counting every year since then twice, so I feel that I count as 64 now. And some mornings, I dámņ well FEEL like it! 🙂

    4. Don’t knock it, Jerry. Pass 40 without weeping? Considering the number of friends I’ve lost who didn’t make it to 40, you should be enjoying every single milestone.
      .
      PAD

  4. As someone rapidly approaching that precipice myself, I offer her my sincerest congratulations and/or condolences, whichever is applicable.

  5. Time is a strange thing. Sometimes it just eddies along at a normal pace, but suddenly something comes along that makes you notice the passage of several decades at once. I’m glad you have a superb achievement to show for it, Peter.

  6. Congratulations to Shana! Wait until one of your kids announces your impending grandfatherhood, as just happened to me…now THAT’S old.

  7. I can feel your pain about feeling old.

    I coach basketball in the town youth league and I’ve been part of the program so long that I’ve now coached the teenage daughters of fathers that played for me when they were teenagers themselves.

    1. One of my favorite teachers ever (fourth and fifth-grade science; first guy who turned something back to me saying essentially, “You phoned this in — do it again.”) said fifteen years or so back, “I’m having students now whose parents I taught. I tell them at Back-to-School Night, ‘I’m okay with this — but the moment you bring me a grandchild, I am SO outta here!'”

    1. No, the phrase is “don’t trust anyone over 30.” She’s got one year left.
      .
      Happy birthday to Shana.
      .
      Rick

  9. [insert string of profanities directed not at the birthday girl in question but rather the relentless march of time]

  10. I’m only 31, and I think by the time I started going to conventions, it was primarily Gwen that was with you, and she was already in her early teens, IIRC. This would be late ’90s/early 2000s, at places like I-CON.

  11. [McEnroe] You canNOT be serious! [/McEnroe]
    .
    More seriously … this would in fact scare the hëll out of me, were it not for the fact that the first batch of seventh-graders I ever taught hit that same threshold a year or two ago.
    .
    But needless to say … Happy Birthday, Shana!
    .
    (My wife’s birthday is tomorrow, and she gets to spend a year enjoying being the Ultimate Answer to everything.)

  12. Hit the big 4-0 myself last week. I have not succumbed to weeping in the fetal position so I guess that’s a good sign.
    .
    Happy birthday, fellow Aries!

  13. Happy birthday, Shana.

    I’m two years away from that mark myself. And while I don’t consider myself old quite yet, I do consider myself too old for my situation. (Man, I have got to get a job that pays some real money so I can move out of my folks’ house).

    But enough about me . . .

  14. I’ve been feeling depressed for being over forty. But I guess it beats the alternative.

    Happy Birthday to your wonderful daughter, and Happy Passover to you all.

  15. My god, she’s thirty? Either I keep underestimating those younger than me really are, or I’m forgetting that time is passing me by and I’m getting old. Maybe both.
    .
    I remember when I first met you at a convention Peter, which I believe was the last Great Eastern convention. If memory serves, Shana was there, this tiny little thing that barely came up to my abdomen, and she was so cute: when the matter of my having a moderate number of comics for you to sign, she enthusiastically offered to help by saying, “I know how to forge his signature!” I remember thinking how odd it was that she had no compunction about admitting this out loud in front of her father.
    .
    Anyway, HAPPY THIRTIETH, SHANA!!

    1. That’s great. If I had a book with Peter David’s signature as forged by one of his daughters, I’d hang it on the wall and tell everyone who saw it.
      .
      Theno

    2. My favorite Shana-at-a-signing story was when I was doing an appearance at a Borders Books. She was around fourteen at the time and, just to keep herself amused, she hovered around the perimeter of the crowd and talked to random people in a dreamlike voice, saying things that were utterly innocuous if you knew she was my daughter, but creepy/stalkerish if you didn’t. Stuff like, “I know where he lives, you know. Sometimes I ride past his house, and other times I even go into his driveway. Sometimes I even pull stuff out of his mailbox. And there are times I think about him sitting on the edge of my bed, singing bedtime songs to me…”
      .
      Good times.
      .
      PAD

      2. Thanks a lot Peter. Now I’ve got co-wrokers looking at me strangely. That’s hysterical. Best take your daughter to work story ever.

      3. And it’s THAT kind of story, ladies and gentlemen, that you break out whenever anyone questions your parenting cred. Amazingly awesome.

    1. The first time I really felt old was one morning when I woke up, stretched…and I popped a calf muscle, sending incredible amounts of pain screaming up and down my leg. And I thought, “I injured myself lying in bed?!? Not running the bases or something, but just LYING here? What the hëll–!?”
      .
      PAD

      1. Well, once when the phone rang I picked it up, sat down on the floor to talk — and threw my back out somehow. It was agony just standing up, I had to use a cane for a week, and worst of all I got to tell my relatives that I was hobbling around like an old man after answering the phone. The irnoy is that I’ve lifted lots of heavy stuff at my job, and none of that ever bothered me. Sadly, part of getting old is that sometimes things just hurt for no reason.

      2. .
        Yeah.
        .
        Last year I was doing stuff with the guy coordinating the fights and stunts on the film that Bill and crew were filming down in Sanford (Bill, wife and cats are all fine by the way) where I was falling flat on my back repeatedly, flying through the air and hitting the ground in a painful looking pile and generally doing everything that I could to look like someone being beaten senseless in a knockdown, drag out fight. Had a blast. It was fun, I could do it all day and I wasn’t even sore by the end of the weekend.
        .
        A few weeks later I was at work doing riot training. In a scenario where I was a protester, I was being gently picked up off of the ground and moved, got twisted ever so slightly oddly and tore an ab muscle. Most of the guys I work with couldn’t believe that that’s what finally injured me. They’ve seen me train, they’ve suffered through training with me and they know that my philosophy about training is to always make training harder than the real thing should be. I am, when it comes to this kind of thing, the person that most of my department usually considers “the crazy one.”
        .
        And I was put out of work for two weeks and change by being picked up off of the ground in a simple carry and remove. What can actually cause injuries are so flipping weird sometimes.

  18. Thank you all for the birthday wishes! I didn’t anticipate 30 feeling any different but on my birthday I got heartburn for the first time ever. Coincidence?

  22. PAD,

    Best wishes to your daughter! I just turned 38 and I feel better now (health wiae losting over 130 lbs helped!)now than I did when I turned 30. Keep up the good work and you are one helluva dad! 🙂

    Mike

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