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The Older I Get, The More I Appreciate Friends My Own Age
The company of my contemporaries is the only thing making me feel like I’m not crazy.
Last week an old friend phoned me out of the blue. He was listening to my latest podcast episode, he told me, and had felt compelled to hit pause in the middle and call me talk to about it. Like me, my friend is a Gen X writer who’s dealing with the effects of an industry that’s reinventing itself in ways that don’t necessarily favor people of our vintage and older. The person I was interviewing on the podcast was a Baby Boomer writer who spoke frankly about being past some definition of his prime. When I referred to him as “middle aged” he pointed out that unless he was going to live to 130 he was something other than middle aged.
“The road narrows,” my guest said at one point in the conversation. “We like to think that the road widens. But one’s options and opportunities narrow until, if you’re lucky, they narrow to the right thing.”
He was talking about professional opportunities, specifically in this case publishing outlets for his 12th novel. But he could have been talking about life in the most ecumenical sense. It’s not just that the horizon gets closer as we get older: the path goes from a six-lane freeway to a tapering forest trail.
