Oops! I forgot I was old

“Never trust anyone over 30,” advised a famous 1960s quote. The line has been variously attributed to Jerry Rubin, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. But apparently, the real source was Jack Weinberg, a leader of the Berkeley cohort of the 1960s student movement for peace, justice, an end to Vietnam War, and reliance on youth for the answers to questions that older folks didn’t even dare ask.

It doesn’t matter, really, who said it. The point is it expressed the mood of a generation, the angst and egocentrism of youth coming up in an era when the “generation gap” was an everyday, throwaway phrase. It was us (youth) vs. them (grown-ups, pigs, “the man,” “the establishment”), and I was among the “us,” if quietly so. At the time, people in their 30s did seem pretty old to me, and decidedly untrustworthy. People in their 40s or 50s (like my parents) seemed really old, and I couldn’t even imagine how feeble and totally out of touch 60 or 70 would be.

I mention this because I’ve had a few experiences lately that reminded me that I am, from that late-adolescent / early-adult perspective, very old. Late-60s old. Fast approaching 70, the age after which my younger self was certain that no worthwhile life remained. But now, living inside that age, I don’t feel at all like I expected to feel. I expected that the late 60s would feel fragile, isolated, and needy. Instead, with the notable exception of certain physical limitations, I feel pretty much like I felt back in the day when I thought 50 was beyond the pale. Sure, I wish I could still do all the things I used to do. And sure, I appreciate the perspective that several added decades of experience bring. But for the most part, my age is invisible to me and pretty irrelevant.

This is unexpected: from the inside, being old is not a major shift from not being old. In fact, I often actually forget that I’m old. I mean that very literally. I actually think (without reflecting on it) that I’m still that younger person and that other people see me as I do. I move through life thinking of myself as … well, myself … and then something reminds that from the outside, my physical appearance marks me as an old woman.

Sometimes, I’m reminded of my age by an encounter with ageism, by the realization that the idea of “old woman” comes heavily wrapped in assumptions, expectations, and stereotypes. On these uncomfortable occasions, all that wrapping unwinds and I realize that people are responding not to me, but to some imaginary creature, their particular concept of an “old woman”—probably not unlike the concept I used to hold.

The other evening, my partner and I were leaving a restaurant, and we stopped to hold doors open for a crowd of folks coming in as we went out. The last two people were a man and a woman who looked to be in their 40s or so. As they passed through the door, the woman said to me, “Thank you! We should be holding the door for you.” Before I even thought it through, I knew I had just smacked into ageism. Whether or not she consciously intended it, the message was clear. “I’m young; you’re old. I should be holding the door for you.” My age had been the farthest thing from my mind, but in that moment, I was reminded that I am old. And I was reminded that my age leads people to treat me not as who I am but as who they see, who they imagine when they encounter an old woman.

But then on other occasions, I’m reminded of my age in a far happier way. I can be sitting with a group of friends of varying ages, just talking, when suddenly one of my friends says something—a story, a life circumstance, a hope, a struggle—that reminds me that I am decades older than she is. I’m really taken aback when this happens because I had forgotten. I know, as I think about it, that when they look at me across the room or across the table, they see my aging physical self, the wrinkled face, graying temples, sagging physique. But their response to me doesn’t carry an ageist tone—nor does it carry patronizing “respect”—so I settle safely into the ease of forgetting.

I actually love the differences in age that inhabit my life. The fact that my friends and I are not all age mates adds lovely texture to our interactions. Events that shaped my coming of age are the stuff of history books for some of them, and their early years were dramatically different from anything I have known. Still today, their lives are filled with experiences that are hugely different from my own. We all have perspectives that have been shaped by those differences, and that makes for conversations that are rich and unexpected. There are a million things we can share, and none of them requires that we be the same age.

Overall, it’s an odd sort of out-of-body experience, this being startled by reminders of my age. I guess it makes sense that I forget. We regularly fail to notice things that seem familiar, and the flow of years through my life seems totally familiar. But if I had 20 to do over again, I think I’d be more inclined to trust this older version of myself. After all, I’m most definitely not the person I expected to be at this age.

Still, this hardly makes for a catchy quote:

“It’s safe to trust people over 30, provided they don’t feel like you think you’ll feel when you reach their advanced age.”

Somehow, I just can’t imagine that on a bumper sticker.