Age Range Anxiety

My morning began with breakfast at the home of a 98-year-old friend of my mother who, after hanging in for 2 ½ hours of wide-ranging convo—almost none of which centered on anyone’s health—I now consider my friend too. My afternoon ended with 1 ½ hours of tennis and wide-ranging convo with the 27-year-old daughter of close friends who crossed over into close friendhood years ago.

In between I had lunch with contemporaries—one Medicare-eligible and two fast approaching—and around dinner considered inviting the one-year-old up the street over if only to cartoonishly extend the day’s leitmotif. I was invited to and attended his only to-date birthday party, so it’s not like we aren’t homies. But the rather obvious point I will now pound to sand is as follows: we humans stratify ourselves along way too many variables, and while I’m not sure age is top three when it comes to dumbness, it’s pretty damn dumb.

One of my least favorite words in the English language is “appropriate”, and I like it even less when people put “age” in front of it. I’ll cop to this being far from my finest quality, but if I hear of an activity that’s branded inappropriate, I will low-key head over every time. I think it sucks that: 1) kids are barred from so many things for no good reason, and 2) adults feel inhibited from doing many of the unserious things that can make childhood such a hoot. These twin realities cause me to bristle, and I do not bristle lightly.

My most enduring memory of what I’ll call “age blindness” is from a trip with my wife’s extended family to Williamsburg, Virginia, sometime early this millennium. There were six kids in the group, five of whom, upon being turned loose in the streets of fake Colonial America after several hours trapped in a car, went appropriately—it’s okay in this context—nuts, running around, putting each other in the stocks and generally being children. One, our son, then maybe seven, wandered into the bootmaker’s shop and spent the next two hours chatting with the 50-something cosplayer while watching him make a boot. Max left the womb like that; if he saw someone doing something he found interesting, he made an age-blind bee line for it. For the record, the other five were and are pretty age-blind themselves, as I never recall any of them bristling at any of my attempts to be the cool grownup. One of them did say “Ok, boomer” to me once, but I probably deserved it.

A window into Max’s thinking came on his ninth birthday, when I drove a minivan six-pack of his friends to a laser tag party none of us wanted, not even the birthday boy, but in 2006 it seemed somehow mandatory. Max wasn’t in the car, and I don’t remember anything specific the boys talked about except for an unshakable memory that it was all stunningly stupid. Again, all those boys have grown up to be fine adults, and were fine 9-year-old boys, but without an at least immature adult to keep the conversation from going off the rails, 9-year-old boy conversation goes instantly off the rails. I remember thinking, this is why Max hangs out with us so much: his peers are morons.

As a child I forged an equally age-blind path, likely for the same reasons. My pre-teen pals were great for playing sports, escaping on bikes, and roaming Rock Creek Park, among other key developmental activities. But they weren’t much help when it came to figuring out any of life’s important questions, even those asked by 9-year-old boys. Maybe that’s why I have such vivid memories of my friends’ parents, siblings and assorted relatives. I thought my family was pretty weird and would use visits to friends’ houses both to compare and avoid going back to mine. I was like a tiny anthropologist, taking mental notes on how other clans designed kinship rituals to maximize community engagement and collective well-being. My best friend growing up was and probably still is Greek, and while his family was every bit as loud as my Jewish one, people seemed to say what was on their mind a lot more freely, and they ate a lot better.

The family on the corner was crazy-to-me exotic and fun, with three adopted children—two brothers—from Poland, homeland to both their dad and mine. Their dad was an incredible cook and party host, at one point chief of staff of a key House committee, and an enormous personality, the mom warm and kind in a way that didn’t even make you think she was up to something. Christmas at their house made me want to convert.

Even better were the homes of my black friends, for their mothers were, as a group, the most unfiltered and therefore most fun grown-ups I knew. My neighborhood was part of DC’s Gold Coast, home to many of the city’s black professionals in the 1960s and 1970s, and the moms in these families seemed like the busiest people in the world to me, though it further seemed nothing ever got by them. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing most of the time; my black friends had no such luxury. But I sensed early on their moms liked the back and forth, even from their sons’ weird-haired white friends, and that became the to-my-mind rich currency of our relationships.

I was close with my mom’s parents despite the age gap. My grandfather and I shared a love of baseball, stupid jokes, and secretly making fun of my grandmother, of whom we were both fundamentally terrified, but who loved few things more than the kind of edgy, witty conversation I sought out from an early age. In high school, and I’m not proud of this, I likely dated at least one girl longer than I should have because I liked her parents so much.

For me and I imagine for most who went, college ushered in an era where we hung out much more with folks our own age, which was tons of fun for a good long while. But then children arrived and quickly offered a whole new category of non-peers to hang out with, and they were so much less complicated and largely more fun than the sometimes very serious professional class I found myself in. For more on my feelings on this matter, see https://jonathankronstadt.substack.com/p/why-children-are-objectively-better-ec0.

These days, as was hopefully made clear way back at the beginning of this clump of words, I’ll hang out with anyone who’s kind, interesting, and at least a little bit funny—a trinity I find common among homo sapiens. My new best friend who I may never see again is a 5-7-year-old girl named Hazel, who arrived at the table at our neighborhood picnic where I was doing my Donald Duck impersonation for anyone interested. I had a small smattering of customers, limited perhaps by my frequently leaving my post to see what else was going on; the bird house and rock painting tables were very popular. Hazel had clearly partaken of our professional face painter, as she had a terrific rainbow on her already smiley face when I shtarted my shtick. My wife had asked me to do face painting but avoiding opportunities to disappoint children is a prime tenet of my personal ethos.

The duck voice, in contrast, has been one of the great joys and mysteries of my life, as I have no recollection when, how, where or why I learned to make this noise kids love a lot. And Hazel was yet another reminder of how great things can get in this realm. She put me through my quacky paces and was clearly thrilled with each offering. Eventually she bounded off to the next activity, but a few minutes later she came back and bade me follow her, to where I knew not. We landed at the rock painting table where she presented me with a tiny rock on which she had painted the face of a duck. I went Disney Donald overboard with gratitude, and she seemed delighted, so even though I think she wound up taking it back at some point, in this case it truly is the thought that counts.

I feel an even greater kinship with children these days than my underwhelming maturity customarily provides, owing to an odd phenomenon of my aging brain: as my memory fades, my curiosity grows. I’ve always been fond of descending into all manner of rabbit holes, and maybe it’s partially because I have more time, but I think more so it’s because I am, as Holden Caulfield so eloquently put it, “just going through a phase.” And I like this phase a lot, because more than ever before, everyone’s invited.