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GenerationsApril 05, 2010 Here's another piece from To Be Rather Than to Seem, my memoir in progress. Actually it's several pieces, most of which started off as tangents in other essays and anecdotes. It's not done yet -- when you write about age, do you really expect to be done? -- but I'm letting it out into the wild anyway. Maybe a year I moved to Martha's Vineyard, I was having supper with my father. He said, "I have no problem with turning sixty-five. What's hard to grasp is that I have a daughter who's thirty-five." That was me. His other kids would have been on the verge of thirty-four, thirty, and twenty-seven. My father and I were the only members of the immediate family born relatively early in the year: my mother and siblings were all born in September or October. I haven't reached sixty-five yet, and not having kids, I'll never have a daughter, or a son, who's thirty-five. My nephew just started college, though, and friends younger than I have grandchildren in elementary school. My own age isn't hard to accept, and the panorama of the decades I've lived through is a wonder. What's strange, what makes it clear that I'm getting older, is the press of people coming up behind me and how old they are. Someone who's thirty-eight is well into her work life, she has her own decades to draw on -- and she's been on the planet two decades less than I have. My nephew is forty years younger than I am. He's an adult, albeit a young one. By the time he reached high school he had gone further in mathematics than I ever did -- and I was no slouch at math. When my father and I had that conversation, he knew thirty-five far better than I knew sixty-four. Psychic maps have a temporal aspect: thirty-five was on his psychic map, but sixty-four wasn't on mine, though thanks to the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four," which I'd been singing along with since high school, it had a character that sixty-three didn't. (Sixty-five becomes a topographical landmark as soon as we learn that it's the conventional retirement age in our country.) Even though his thirty-five looked very different from mine, still, he'd been there. For me sixty-four -- and sixty, fifty, even forty -- was beyond the horizon, "Here be dragons" territory. Now forty and fifty are way back in my wake; sixty is coming up fast. My father died at eighty-six, two years ago, and I still remember that conversation we had when he was sixty-four and I thirty-five. * * * "Don't trust anyone over thirty" was the slogan of my generation, the baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s. I'm sure I said it a few times, but my general attitude toward it, as toward most things, was "It depends." Not for an instant did I buy what some of my agemates took to be the corollary: "Anyone under thirty is trustworthy." I had irrefutable empirical evidence that this was crap. Well before I turned thirty, I understood why "Don't trust anyone over thirty" pissed people over thirty off, but I was probably well over thirty before I caught the anomaly. People under thirty (in some cases barely so) may have come up with and popularized the phrase, but most of those editing the newspapers and deciding what images and words were seen on the nightly news weren't under thirty, and they're the ones who turned it into the watchphrase of "the sixties generation." For that matter, they also invented "the sixties generation." * * * When I was a teenage horsegirl and had to stay late at school for a meeting, rehearsal, or special event, Grandma often did my barn chores and took my horse out for a trail ride. Not till I got back into horses in my very late forties did it register that Grandma turned seventy the year I turned fourteen, so she was in her seventies most of the time she was doing this. She died at eighty, ten days after suffering a stroke; she had been horseback riding not long before. The realization expanded my temporal map, my sense of my own possibilities: I can keep riding into my seventies and even eighties if I want to. During several of my adult horse years, I worked alongside women a generation younger than I, and girls who ranged in age from eight to sixteen or so. I like to think that decades hence some of them will realize that their colleague Susanna, the one who stacked hay, mucked stalls, helped them catch horses, and went out for long trail rides accompanied only by her dog, was in her fifties most of that time. * * * While we were studying Europe between the two world wars, Sylvia Sherman, my high school world history teacher, told us about a study she'd recently read about. According to the study, most people's worldview was pretty much set by the time they reached their twenty-third birthday. They kept taking in new information, but the framework into which it was assimilated didn't change much. She related this to the ways in which the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 and designed to prevent the war that had just ended, helped to bring about the war that few people negotiating the treaty could even imagine. I was still in high school. Twenty-three was still a ways off, but I was concerned. "Don't trust anyone over thirty" was already in the air. I didn't have to look very far to see that mental ossification was very real. How could I avoid it? We joked in class about cramming as much information as we could into our heads before we turned twenty-three. Miss Sherman's words took up residence in my head and lived there quietly for many years. Eventually it dawned on me that what made twenty-three significant might not be anything biological. By twenty-three, most people in our society had settled into their adult lives. If we went to college, we'd graduated; if we learned a trade, we were now practicing it; perhaps we were married and/or raising children and/or buying a house. By twenty-three, most people weren't falling through looking-glasses or searching out new neighborhoods. If the possibility arose, they might well turn away from it, or pretend it wasn't there. Their worlds weren't expanding, so the old maps worked well enough: they got to where they were going, without running into any unexpected walls. If the map works, why expand it, replace it, or even revise it? * * * Studying Macbeth as a junior in high school, I had an epiphany: people who lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries weren't stupid or naïve or all that different from the people in my mid-twentieth-century world. Their language took some getting used to, their situations were -- on the surface, at least -- unfamiliar, but I recognized their flaws and their strengths; I even got a lot of their jokes, digs, and innuendos. Sometimes they were downright profound. The information wasn't new -- we'd read Romeo and Juliet the year before and performed As You Like It as eighth-graders (I was type-cast as Touchstone, of course) -- but now it caught my attention, put down roots, and began to affect how I saw the world. Songs written by people who were dead by the time I heard their words pointed me toward a history that wasn't taught in school. Now I listen to songs that were topical forty years ago: not only are they pointing young people toward events that took place before they were born, but many of those songs are still topical. In a way this is depressing -- has nothing changed? -- but in a way it isn't: it affirms the continuity of history, of generations. The generations are so fluid it's a wonder anyone dares make generalizations about them. At my father's memorial service in August 2008, we sang Pete Seeger's "Sailing Down My Golden River." The lyrics describe the singer's sons and daughters as "golden sparkles in the foam." So are we all. What's underneath changes far more slowly than what's on the surface.
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