We were on a family walk in the countryside and I decided to grab a selfie with my daughter. She asked to see the photograph. “You look really old,” she said. I looked at the photograph, studied the man next to the young girl and grudgingly concluded that she was not wrong. “That’s because I’m middle-aged,” I said with more than a hint of defensiveness. “You’re not middle-aged, dad,” my daughter said, and for a moment my heart filled with love and gratitude. “You mean that?” I said. “You’re not middle-aged,” she continued, “you’re upper-aged.”
I can’t tell you what I thought of old people when I was young because I am not sure I thought about them at all. In my teens and twenties, I treated older people almost as if they were part of another species, citizens of another land with different habits and rituals. It was not a country to which I wished to belong. I liked being young and feared being old. I liked to surround myself with friends younger than me in the hope, if not the expectation, that their youth might somehow rub off on me. It worked, for a while.
