I’ll give you a trivial example.
A friend said this a few days back: I ought to hang out with younger people more. Younger people are into music. Older people are not. (I am eleven years older than her.)
My immediate reaction was to actually want to land a punch at the side of her jaw and watch the teeth fall to the floor. But I love her dearly and so instead, I embraced my inner calm and made some lame comment about music this and that.
Music. When I moved from Poland to the States the first time around at the age of 7, I was sent to summer camp for two months. Even before falling in love with junk food and television, I took to the guitar that summer. I played in a self-taught sort of way all the way through high school (back in Poland for that). My boyfriend taught me interesting plunking techniques and I spent pretty much every evening of my adolescence fiddling with my guitar.
When I turned 16 (still in Poland) I collected my first paycheck for cleaning up refuse in the city parks of Warsaw. With that first paycheck I bought a violin and then paid for a year’s worth of violin lessons from a university student whose name I grabbed from the campus bulletin board (I was then a student too, but in Poland universities were free and students lived at home so you could use earnings to indulge your music cravings.)
Did all this die in middle age? No. One could well trace my midlife rebellion right back to music, in fact.
It’s just that, well, it’s just that when you are plunging ahead with your life, you look squarely at your options and, in years where you are strong, you set your priorities straight and you move forward. That movement included, for me, many years of scant contact with music.
Age? It has nothing to do with it! You either are a person who loves music, in all its shapes and sizes, or you are indifferent to it. You don’t outgrow it though. Ever.
Tonight, I spent some hours hanging around guitarists. They didn’t play nearly enough to keep me happy. But the grilled burgers made up for it.
Whoever that friend is who said the thing about needing to hang out with younger people is clearly having a midlife crisis of her/his own.
ReplyDeleteI think it's good to hang out with whomever makes you happy. Life is too short (even for "younger" people) to waste it with people who don't. If, as a second order of priority, those people happen to fall within a broad age range, so much the better.
Fine, I will admit that I made that stupid comment about wanting more friends in Madison who are younger. The comment was stupid in part because I said it to 3 of my closest friends -- all of whom are older than me and all of whom make me incredibly happy. I didn't appreciate at the time how insensitive I was being until these 3 friends set me straight. Sorry. I blame it on my midlife crisis.
ReplyDeleteEven so, what Tonya said is not what she is quoted in this post as having said. She said that older people are not as into buying music and listening to new music as younger people, which is basically a fact of music marketing. I have 5 times more disposable income than I did in my early years of graduate school, and buy 1/5 as much music.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jeremy. Us young people have to stick together.
ReplyDelete