Being a person who has strange and random thoughts has its advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage is that it’s a cheap and portable form of entertainment, sometimes causing you to laugh out loud in a solemn place like the line at the DMV. The disadvantage is that it sometimes causes you to laugh out loud in solemn places, causing people to wonder, quite correctly, if you’re weird.

While stuck in an unmoving line the other day I had one of those random thoughts: lives can generally be summarized by four phrases. But further thought led me to believe that this was, at best, an imperfect model. Maybe even wrong.

First the four phrases.

We start off with, “Isn’t he (she) cute.” This one is reserved for newborns and other small children. It seems like the sight of a baby will cause any woman’s heart to melt, no matter what the baby looks like. My mother, who occasionally made bassinets—little, bitty, frilly beds—for expectant mothers, would go completely out of character when faced with a baby. “Isn’t she (he) cute.” Sometimes she would add, “Just darling.”

I should note here that this is what she said even when the baby looked like a very small eighty-year-old man who had been parboiled. Bald. Wrinkled. And with a rosy red complexion.

I should note, too, that the subject of all this gushing really didn’t have any responsibility for it. All the baby did was get born.

The second phrase comes along anywhere from 18 to 38 years later. It’s “he’s such a promising young man.” This or its female variant is generally said of anyone who’s found gainful employment, managed to keep it, and has stayed out of jail. Other than that it’s applied pretty indiscriminately. When I was young there were “promising young men” all over the place. Some of them did something. Some didn’t; they simply stopped being young.

Then we skip down about forty or so years, and we hear, “His mind’s as sharp as it ever was.” For the most part, this means that the subject doesn’t drool a lot or still does crossword puzzles or manages to match up subjects and verbs correctly. There’s not a very high standard for it.

In fact, there’s a pretty low standard. For most of our life we are encouraged to try to get better every day. Then we reach the point where it’s remarkable that we haven’t gotten worse. That’s depressing.

Finally, there’s “doesn’t he look natural.” Again, this doesn’t really have much to do with the subject. It means that the undertaker has done a pretty good job. If I am ever laid out in a casket (and given my post-parting instructions, that’s doubtful), this phrase will probably be roughly equivalent to, “They finally got all five of the cowlicks to lay down at the same time.”

So we go from cute to natural in a short span of years. We don’t know anything when we’re cute, and we know less when we’re natural. And when we’re promising, it’s not a lot our fault.

Which led me to the flaw in this whole thing. There’s a significant span called middle age when we do know something, when we’re really doing something, and when we either shoulder our responsibilities or don’t. There’s no appropriate phrase that goes along with it.

There is, of course, talk of midlife crisis, but that simply describes a degree of psychosis that men (and probably women, although they call it something else) go through when they discover that they’ve got as much time behind them as they have in front of them, and they’re not half-way to the goal line. People have quit calling them promising young men.

These are the years where working people have either gotten far enought up the corporate ladder that their responsibilities significantly exceed their authority, or they’ve come to the conclusion that they’re never going to go as far as they had hoped, planned, and expected. In some cases, especially with people who have chosen to make their own way as artists, musicians, writers, or entrepreneurs, this is the time when they become good enough to know that they will never become good enough to achieve the dream they originally started chasing.

And these are the years when their children not only learn that their parents aren’t infallible, they remind them of it several times a day. The child in the bassinet that you stood over just to make sure you could hear his or her breath has become a teenager, and you wonder if the entire concept of children shouldn’t be revisited.

These are also the years when your parents have grown old, and you worry about your responsibilities to them, and whether you should make decisions for the same people who spent so many years making decisions for you.

These are the years when the world seems to be upside down: the people you took care of don’t want you to take care of them anymore and the people who took care of you need your care.

It’s a bewildering time.

But we don’t have a good phrase for it. Somehow “isn’t he responsible” really doesn’t have the cachet. I’ve heard people say that someone is “a good provider,” but that essentially reduces the person to an ATM. I’m really at a loss for the defining phrase.

Probably it’s not something I should worry a lot about. I’m not longer cute (if I ever was, but my mother thought so). I am no longer promising. I am, I think, as sharp as I ever was, but it seems to be bit of a rear guard action. And I’m not yet looking natural. I just hope that there are younger, more enthusiastic heads out there who can come up with a good phrase for that time of life when we carry the greatest number of burdens and face the flickering light of our future.

I told you that having random thoughts had its disadvantages.