Just Desserts

When I was younger, I envisioned aging as a kind of punishment for having the audacity to survive. Youth, I thought, was like having dessert before the entrée. And while youth is certainly sweet, it also contains a lot of empty calories. When you’re young, you think dessert is the best part of the meal. “You can’t have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat,” the song goes. As a young person, that seemed very unfair.

Now that I’m older, I realize that perspective was all wrong. For the first time in my life, I feel older. Not old, but older. For decades, I didn’t. For years and years, I remained the same loveable scamp I’d always been. Lately, though, something’s shifted. Don’t misunderstood: I’m still loveable, still a scamp, but less Dudley Moore in Arthur and more Robert DeNiro in Bad Grandpa.

To take the film analogy a step further, I sometimes feel like I’m seeing the world and the people within it as though it were a movie being played that I’ve already seen. It’s not déjà vu exactly, but it might be déjà vu’s more sentimental cousin.

People walk by on the street that I recognize – not because I actually recognize them but because they call to mind somebody from the past. Somebody who was once their age, in this city, walking these same streets. I want to stop them and tell them about my friend who was once their age. I want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them about my friend John who used to drive his Vespa through winding roads late at night before he died. “You look like him,” I want to say. It’s a strange thing to see somebody you know in the faces of people you’ve never met. Whenever that happens, it makes me almost cramp up nostalgia.

Youth

Or when I eavesdrop on people – and I often eavesdrop on the people – the conversations I'm overhearing are the same conversations I've heard thousands of times before. Stories about family and friends and the various ways people have delighted or disappointed each other. How long have we been saying these same words to each other in different dialects and different clothes and different times?

In a way, there’s something reassuring about it. People, as the saying goes, are people. We have a few simple lines of code in our DNA that we follow: eat, sleep, fuck, die. Everything else is décor. But it’s with the décor with which we spend most of our time fussing. The superfluous details that distinguish you from me. You have X number of dollars and I have Y, or whatever metrics we use to separate ourselves from ourselves. We think we are the furniture instead of the foundation. We are not.

I’ve written before about the bird feeder outside my kitchen window. All day the birds and squirrels congregate around the thing to feed and gossip and argue. Day after day, the same shit. How are they any different from us? That’s a criticism neither of them nor ourselves. It’s just life, in all of its prosaic splendor. But I think it maybe takes accumulating a certain number of years before one can appreciate the beauty in all of this sameness. Our problems almost certainly feel to us the same as the problems of a dozen centuries ago felt to those who inhabited those times.

But I never imagined reaching an age where one can feel deep time. I don’t mean geological time, which our stupid human brains can’t quite process, but the deep time of our own species, the recognition that comes from making the intuitive leap from seeing a couple generations go through the same things and realizing that “same as it ever was” is, in fact, the same as it ever was.

We lose some things as we age, of course. I remember when I was a kid and I’d hear about a professional athlete talking about “losing a step,” I didn’t really understand what that meant. Having lost more than a few steps along the way, I certainly do now. It’s the sense that the body no longer operates in the same ways it was once did. Does that make it worse? I’m tempted to say no, that it’s only different, but that would be a lie. It’s definitely worse.

Me

They say youth is wasted on the young, but I don’t think so; after all, when you’re young and in possession of one of those springy and beautiful bodies, what else are you going to do with it other than stay out all night getting high and finding somebody to shag? That’s exactly what young people should be doing. If I found myself in my own twenty-three-year-old body again, that’s what I would be doing. Why not? Youth isn’t wasted on the young. They know exactly what to do, and they do it. We just resent them for their energy and exuberance because ours has been washed away. What has replaced it, though, is something just as lovely, though subtler.

But I’m slower now. I am appreciative of slower things. I pine for soup. I’m content to spend my mornings doing the New York Times Spelling Bee. When I was younger, I didn’t even have mornings. Afternoons were my mornings. Now I’m a scamp who sits in the kitchen with an oversized mug of tea and an eye on the bird feeder out the window. I watch the animals. I watch the leaves fall from the trees. I think about stuff. I enjoy my mornings.

Though reaching this stage caught me off-guard, it’s good, being older. That’s something the younger me would not have understood. But it’s true. It’s good to enjoy the long meal, to sit with friends and family and discuss the world, to eavesdrop on strangers, to see familiar faces, and to remember the dead. I’ve had my dessert. It was lovely. But now I’m ready to tuck into something more substantive. Chew slowly, friends, and try not to spill on your Christmas sweaters.