The Last Minute Still Counts

I realized Sunday night, the night before Labor Day, that I had somehow managed to go the whole summer without having a real Baltimore snowball.

If you grow up in Baltimore — even in the suburbs — the snowball is a cultural essential. It’s not an Italian ice, it’s not a snowcone, it’s not Hawaiian shaved ice, it’s a snowball, a concoction unique to the city, rich in culture and nostalgia.

And a summer without at least one seems like it would be a sin.

So on Labor Day I made sure to stop by Opie’s,a Catonsville institution for over thirty years, and treat myself to a cold sugary jolt.

Because getting something done at the last minute, is still getting it done.

Somehow that seems a fitting meditation as we enter the fall — and I personally enter the last few months before my fiftieth birthday. It’s not too late.

Are you 93 years old and haven’t written that novel yet? It still counts if you do it now! In your fifties and never finished college? If you go back to school you’ll get the same diploma as someone in their twenties. (And the same debt, but that’s an orthogonal issue.)

We live in a culture that tends to presume that only young people can do something new, that normalizes ageism and presumes that once you’re past 30 or so you have little new to offer the world.

Don’t believe it. Stun the world with your last-minute entry.