WORKING AT THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which I joined some eight months ago, has been an unalloyed pleasure. With one somewhat disconcerting exception. My office is located in a corner where I find myself surrounded by twentysomethings, and for the first time in my life, I am not only one of the older people on staff but feeling–well, practically at the threshold of senility.
I should explain. My parents, by the standards of the era, were older than usual (my father was 42 when I was born, my mother 38) and I am, by several years, the youngest of three siblings. I skipped a grade in elementary school, which means that, after age eight, I was always younger than my classmates, which was no great social advantage. For much of my working life I was often the junior in the office, and in some circumstances supervised colleagues significantly older than myself.
As it happens, I have always been very comfortable around geezers, and enjoy drawing them out in conversation. This stems partly from an interest in the time of their lives (late 19th/early 20th century) and partly from the fact that I grew up among older relatives, neighbors, family friends, music teachers, etc., and so learned to ingratiate myself with the senior set while maneuvering among my contemporaries. All of which is to say that I have tended to think of myself as perpetually younger than I really am, Peck’s Bad Boy seated in the rear of the classroom, tossing spitballs.
Which is more than a little delusional. Some years ago I attended a class reunion and was deeply flattered when several of my female classmates remarked that I had scarcely changed, in appearance or manner, since our days in school together. When I reported this exciting news to my wife, she diagnosed the situation with her customary sardonic clarity: It was not that I was so youthful now, she surmised, but that I had been prematurely middle-aged then.
Perhaps so. When I walk around downtown Washington, and think I see an acquaintance from childhood, I have to remind myself that so-and-so would scarcely look like the person I see but more closely resemble my own dilapidated, gray-haired self.
Working at The Standard has not been helpful. Since I am at least twice the age of many of the young people floating around here, I have to remind myself that vivid memories from, say, the early 1960s or mid-’70s occurred before they were born, and are as remote from them as the Depression was to me.
I understand that there is bound to be a mutual incomprehension about such things as pop culture, and that their collective memories are different from my own. But I was astonished one day to learn that none of them had ever heard of (much less seen) Harvey, the great Jimmy Stewart comedy about a dipsomaniac and his invisible rabbit, which was produced the year I was born and still makes me laugh. When I deliver a cherished line from Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 State of the Union address (“the harsh caliche soil of . . . the Pedernales River”) or a favorite Jimmy Carter press conference (“Bert, I’m proud of you”) I might as well be speaking of the Roaring Twenties or President Cleveland.
I have also noticed that, whenever I launch into some reminiscence, or deliver myself of a sage observation, the young folks in the vicinity grow politely silent and listen respectfully. I have had to restrain a natural inclination to flirt, and understand, with some sadness, that accepting my invitation to an after-hours cocktail would be (from their point of view) an act of charity. At such times, colleagues closer to my own age are already safely at home, worrying about their mortgages.
This is, I suppose, a symptom of the Baby Boom tendency toward perpetual adolescence–or, put another way, an unconscious decision to avoid reality. But I am genuinely mystified by the discrepancy between what I read on the calendar and what I see in the mirror. With the exception of occasional aches, reading glasses, and a certain stiffness in the morning, I don’t feel very different from the way I felt two decades ago, and am still inclined to address my elders as “Mr.” and “Mrs.”
From a Freudian standpoint, the mystery deepens. I well remember my father when he was the same age as I am, and my memory suggests that he was considerably more subdued and sedentary–more elderly, if you will–than I believe myself to be. (He was dead 10 years later.) Of course, this could all be a matter of perspective, and the ghastly truth is that my children, and my younger colleagues at work, see in me the same decrepit spectacle I saw in my parent.
Still, while I am not exactly a dazzling exemplar of physical culture, I do ride my bicycle, run up the stairs, dance with my wife, chase my daughter, roll around on the floor with my beagle–all things my father wouldn’t have dreamed of doing at this age. Youthful energy or absence of dignity? Probably both.
–Philip Terzian
