In the last couple of years I have pondered the aging process. It is easy to put your finger on age as a compendium of physical collapses: one day you are going up the stairs and your knees start to creak and what once was reversible is now with you for good. On a night out in a crowded bar where some exciting new band is yodelling the city’s dernier cri you find yourself yearning for your coverlet and hot water bottle. Another day you start to sit downstairs on the bus because your shopping bags are particularly loaded and never make it up again to the front seats on the upper decker.
It is much harder to fix aging as a mental process. In my mind, I am the same person I have ever been and the first few times I registered a differential and deferential treatment from those younger than me, I was slightly perturbed. A line had been drawn that made it indecorous for me to stray to the other side of the age divide. It was frustrating because I could still read the codes that those of previous generations could not decipher: I knew what was behind a t-shirt, a nail varnish, the flickering light of a website, I could hear a snippet of music and have a sense of communal recognition.
Then the sourness of those moments when youth, that very far away very small print that you are usually unable to read, comes in sharp focus and you realise that it is written in a language that you cannot decipher any more. This happened to me in a city centre café where I was having coffee and cake a couple of days ago: wandering around an airy room with high ceilings, my eyes finally settled on the young girl sitting two tables away from me: late teens, long unkempt but very healthy and clean hair of lustrous gold-brown, clear complexion; her attention is fully concentrated on the plastic knife she is using to dissect a cheesecake brownie that she has taken out of the paper bag that she is using instead of a plate. She is holding a take away coffee cup with her slender fingers crowned with chipped dark nail varnish. And I realise that I cannot read this girl. I simply cannot settle the question as to whether she is saving money by ordering take away and yet having it indoors, or whether she prefers the lighter packaging, or whether she is in thrall to America’s love affair with everything deciduous; Or a mixture of all three. What is not in question is that she looks graceful doing something that would mark me as odd. She is young.
Surrounded by the cup, saucer, plate and cutlery that tie me to the table in this cafe, I feel as outmoded as a venerable dowager drinking from a china cup in an ancient tearoom.
A Fistful of Olives 