- Share This Post
- submit
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
Nobody gets old overnight, but for some of us it feels that way.
When I took my first full-time job at age 16 I was, fairly obviously, the youngest kid in the crowd. I was what they called then a clerk-typist, the lowest level employee in the homeowners’ insurance department of a large mortgage loan firm, and the next youngest person there was about 21 or 22. Five years is a big difference when you’re 16, and everyone else at my place of employment was anywhere from 25 to 60 or so.
It was the late 1950s, the beatnik era with which I had aligned myself from mid-high school years. I spent my evenings and weekends with the poets, jazz musicians, writers and self-appointed philosophers of the day in Sausalito and San Francisco and, as with my day job, I was always the youngest kid in the crowd.
Time passed, as did the beatnik era. I lived in several cities across the country until I settled in New York. I married, divorced, made my way through several short- and long-term relationships and traveled a lot for work hardly noticing as the years – and decades – piled up that I was getting older.
If I wasn’t the youngest kid in the crowd anymore, there were enough older people around whom I respected or admired that when I bothered to consider it, I continued to think of myself of as a young person.
Then, in 1995, the earliest years of the commercial internet, I took a job as the first managing editor at cbsnews.com. In those days, there were hardly any website standards yet and it was an earn-while-you-learn proposition with an almost wild-west, frontier feel to it.
We worked – 25 of us in one small room with a bunch of computers – long hours, seven days a week with no time to think about anything beyond the rush of publishing deadlines all day every day. Although no one understood yet how the web would develop, we knew we were part of some big, new enterprise which created an excitement and an edge to even our mundane tasks.
It was in this busy atmosphere that I looked up from my computer screen one day in search of whomever it was I need to speak with and was brought up short: every person in that room was in their early or mid-twenties. Except me. For the first time in my life or, the first time I’d noticed, I was the oldest kid in the crowd.
The moment was shocking – as extreme a feeling as if, having been short all one’s life, one is suddenly tall. My perspective was off-kilter as well as my sense of self.
As I pondered my newly-realized position in the timeline of life over the ensuing weeks and months, I came to see, among other things, how the cultural touchstones of generations are different. One of the standard conversation points of my generation and older – Where were you when John Kennedy was shot? – meant nothing to my young colleagues; they hadn’t been born yet.
They related to The Beatles in a manner similar to mine with Frank Sinatra: there is no memory of them not having been part of the musical landscape. And conversely, I had no sense of the nature of the hot band they followed in the summer of 1996. (If memory serves, it was Smashing Pumpkins that year.)
When you’ve spent 55 years believing you’re the youngest kid in the crowd – which, in a sense, is like being a perennial child looking up at adults - it takes a good while to settle into being the oldest. It’s new territory, a new experience that sneaks up on you while you’re busy living, without any preparation.
Being old today is nothing like being old when I was a kid – at least not what it appeared to be from the vantage point then of childhood when your 35-year-old parents seemed old and grandparents might as well have arrived on the Mayflower. Now, in a culture that has changed into one as deeply youth-besotted and –oriented as ours, it’s hard to know where you fit in when the number of your years (suddenly) equals aged.
I’m still working on how to be old.
* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By, What it’s really like to get older.
