Notes from a Young Senior

On saying goodbye to middle age

I turned 60 years old today. It’s a sobering number: by any standard, I have fewer days in front of me than I do behind me—very likely less than half as many. This is a reality that is intensified by the fact that I am a high school teacher, which means I spend my days among people who are approximately a quarter of my age: by their standards, I have already lived four lifetimes, and the realities of my time would be difficult for my students to imagine in the unlikely event they’re inclined to do so. (I am now older than most of their parents.) My relevance is something I can never take for granted, and is indeed a perishing commodity even as I strive to put things in terms they can understand. But in that regard, the problem is only one of degree, since making ourselves comprehensible to each other is one of the great challenges of human existence at any age.

Actually, in recent days, the number I have been thinking about is less 60 than 50. I say so because it was that’s when I date my sense of having a continuous memory. My life before that is episodic fragments. I know Robert Kennedy’s assassination on June 4, 1968 as the day my first twin bed was delivered to my family’s Queens apartment. I have flickering images in my head of watching the Vietnam War on our living room television. My recollection of the moon landing in 1969 is a matter of the T-shirt I wore commemorating the event. But when I turned 10 years old on December 9, 1972—a day I remember most for consuming an entire meatball hero by myself, signaling bigger appetites to come—the political event known as Watergate was underway, one that would culminate about 20 months later with my watching Richard Nixon’s resignation, again on television, at my best friend’s house. From that point on, world events—the Energy Crisis, the fall of Saigon, the rise and fall of Jimmy Carter—would unfold as the background of my adolescence until I came of age circa 1980. Now these are developments I introduce to students in the courses I teach and the books I write.

There are any number of reasons to envy the young. But I feel lucky to be born when I was. I arrived in this world a few weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the closest the world has come to nuclear Armageddon, but which, given its outcome of Soviet capitulation, I think of as the very apex of American global supremacy that had been cresting ever since the end of the Second World War seventeen years earlier. The benefits of this world order were in many ways material: while there was certainly economic struggle in American life, including in my own family, it was nevertheless a time of truly fabulous affluence, one that underwrote many of the cherished social and cultural changes that followed. That tide has since receded, though the psychic dividends of empire are still being paid, something many Americans still only dimly understand but which will come into ever sharper focus as they taper and eventually get cut off.

But that too is largely background noise. We get up in the morning mindful of stomachs to fill, deadlines to meet, and dreams to refine in the factories of our imaginations. My own factory shows clear signs of wear, its products flawed or obsolete, its capacity increasingly limited. But the machinery is still operating. I continue to manufacture products (were I younger, I’d say write code) that I can trade for a living and sell for satisfaction, and others of modest utility I may yet design. The newsletter you’re reading is one such evanescent contraption. I’m happy to share this time with you.

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