Back in 1961, when my mother brought my sisters and I up to Madison, Wisconsin from Turialba, Costa Rica, I started at the local elementary school into the prescribed second grade as the back-to-school season began. Within two weeks I had frustrated my teacher to the point where my mother was called in for a conference to discuss my schooling. It seemed that my one year of one-room schoolhouse education on the tropical grounds of the Institute where my mother worked had caused me to be inappropriately positioned in a midwestern second grade classroom. I was irresponsibly using cursive rather than block printing and spelling words like “community” rather than the more appropriate “cat”. So, the powers that be convinced my mother, who was just starting her graduate work in, of all things, adult education, to allow me to be pushed up into the third grade. I went instantly from being the smartest and oldest in my class to being the dumbest and the youngest in my class. What might strike us now as a minor adjustment was earthshakingly challenging to me at the time. It took me most of third and fourth grade to claw my way back up to respectable above average grades. It probably didn’t help that I was working without glasses despite an undiagnosed astigmatism and general inability to see the blackboard, but let’s just say that I was teetering on the edge of educational dysfunction. For the rest of my life to and through graduate school, I was always the youngest in the crowd. Getting an MBA at 22 and going to Wall Street kept me pretty much in that youngest grouping. My natural aggressive instincts then kicked in and I proceeded up the corporate ladder, always being first five and then ten and eventually as much as fifteen years younger than my peers.
Wall Street tends to be a young man’s game and it is not unusual for people to cycle out and into other related professions by their early forties, but I stuck around for one reason or another (perhaps specifically because of that catching-up process I had been dragging around with me) and gradually saw myself go from the youngest of my peers to being of average age and then, very quickly and with noticeable acceleration, the oldest in the group. I tended to hang out more with my working teams rather than my senior management brethren for some reason, so I more or less became the old guy all of a sudden. When I think of my old work friends, they tend to fall into two distinct categories; those that are a dozen years my senior and those that are a dozen years my junior. For some reason, I seem to be missing the people that were more or less my own age.
Back in 1996 when I formed the American Flyers Motorcycle Club, the brand that I wear on my shoulder as a tattoo, I was 42 and the old man of the group, Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein, was 63. I just visited with Arthur last month in Florida where he is a spry 93 years old. I am now one of only a few of the AFMC crowd that is still riding and while there are not too many older than me…and only older by a year or two…most of the riders are younger.
I am still friends with a lot of people that are aging out and in their eighties now, an age that is hard to characterize as anything but old. I haven’t added up the tally, but I suspect that if I did I would find that I have more younger friends than older friends at this point. I can even see the difference in my neighborhood crowd. Some are spending more time at home…those are the oldsters, and some are talking about doing things in their life progression that feel distinctly in the category of “done that…and quite a while ago”. Just last night there was a whole discussion about signing up for Medicare, something I did seven years ago and even Kim did three years ago. This older and younger friend configuration doesn’t seem to diminish the older I get and I find that I am constantly jumping between the two worlds. I feel very empathetic towards my older friends that are getting to that stage in life where they are struggling with health issues and restrictions to their capabilities. I feel quite drawn to helping out those friends in anyway I can perhaps because I know that I too will be there, but maybe because I think of them as my peers and think how shitty it must be to have the issues that they’re facing. By the same token when I hang with my younger friends, I do my best too pretend that I can keep up with them and I will admit that my recent improvement in fitness allows me to do so a bit more. If someone wants to go for a walk or hike, I’m all in in fact I’m sometimes suggesting a hike or a walk, as amazing is that seems to some people who’ve known me for a long time. I’ve never been much of a party animal, but if somebody wants to go out and do something like go to an attraction or a dinner out, I’m the first one to grab for the gusto. I like keeping up with the younger friends and I don’t even mind making fun of myself by reminding them of how much older I am than they are. It probably helps maintain my sense of humor about this because I don’t have any serious health problems and I don’t have any replacement part issues with my body and I find it somewhat interesting that some of these younger folks are now going through knee and hip and shoulder replacements in ways that I’ve never had to deal with. I am careful not to make fun of them for that because they’re but for the grace of God goes any of us and I feel like I’m likely to hit up against some sort of physical constraint walls at some point and probably won’t appreciate the retaliation I would be due at that time.
I always find myself wondering if I’m the first person to feel the things I feel. I’m not so narcissistic as to think that no one has ever thought the things I’m thinking whether about aging or about health or about anything, but I do wonder if others are experiencing the same awareness that I am about things like youngsters and oldsters in their coterie of friends. I guess about the only thing I can say is that we should stay aware of our friends aging issues, but neither focus on them nor ignore them, be sympathetic of them, but inspire them to stay as young as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can. Doesn’t that pretty much tell the whole tale of youngsters and ulsters and life in general?