Relativity

In Trollope's Barchester Towers, seventeen-year-old Griselda Grantly asks her archdeacon father if the new rector, Mr. Arabin, is a young man. "About forty, I believe," said the archdeacon. "'Oh!' said Griselda. Had her father said eighty, Mr. Arabin would not have appeared to her to be very much older."

This passage reminded me of my college graduation exercises, when I could find little to distinguish the 25th reunion class from the 50th. What was true for Griselda Grantly at 17 and for me at 21 continues to be true. At my wife's 50th college reunion, the Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes remarked that the graduating seniors look at us and wonder how anyone so old can be ambulatory.

When I was in grade school, all my teachers seemed old beyond reckoning, although most of them were probably well below fifty. Even my high school teachers seemed old to me, with the exception of my English teacher, who was in his twenties. I was able to recognize his youth because he wasn't that much older than I was, but as for the other teachers, I saw them undifferentiated as to age. They were simply old.

Sixteen years ago, when my wife and I were dining in New Zealand - I forget what town we were in - we asked our young waiter what there was to do at our next stop, Queenstown. "Bunji jumping," he said, then paused, "but I guess you're beyond that now." I was only 62 and my wife 57, and although it's doubtful we would have gone bunji-jumping at any age, we could have done it even then, but to our young waiter we might as well have been ninety.

Whatever principle is at work here, it also operates in reverse. Even when I was in my fifties, my late uncle used to address me as "young man," and my 97-year-old friend, who died last year, saw me as youthful. Today I look at my endocrinologist and wonder if she's old enough to drive. Anyone under 45 seems young to me, but that age keeps rising. It used to be 35 and before long, if I'm lucky, it will be 55. It's not that I'm getting old exactly; it's just that more and more people seem so young.