At a neighborhood happy hour last night, pleasantly buzzed and comfortable in my own skin for once (it takes years for this kind of social mastery to kick in when you’re used to being resolutely Asian and therefore slightly-always-sometimes feeling like an outcast), I was chatting with a young mom about clothes shopping. She was young and pretty in that fresh-faced mid-twenties kind of way. As she hoisted her baby onto her hip, I complimented her shirt. “Oh,” she laughed, “Yes, I think I got this thing at Target. But it’s so hard to shop nowadays! I can’t seem to find any decent clothes anymore. Things are either too stodgy or too hipster for me. I just want something simple and elegant. And looks nice. Maybe I’m just getting getting old.”
Oh that line! “I’m getting old”. Clearly, she is not getting old. Not yet, anyway. She’s gorgeous and blooming. But evidently, something in her yearns for days of yore; for boundless energy, and a future that stretches long beyond the horizon.
I often quip those three little words too, “I’m getting old.” It’s a defense mechanism. I’m girding myself so that I won’t be too disappointed by the onslaught of creaky joints and saggy skin. I play a secret game, surreptitiously analyzing bystanding women of indeterminate age. I catalogue crows feet, wrinkles, and glow (or lack-thereof), and I make up numbers for these women. This private little game is pathological, both indulgent and compulsive, a deeper symptom of our culture’s love affair with youth.
And on the finite plane, of course this makes sense. We spend our youth, and we can’t get it back. Between time and money, tell me which is the more precious commodity.
When my nephew Jordan was a baby, video calls with him were snippets of glee. I recall the purity of his fascination with a nose, a mouth, and ear, close-ups on the camera, then a wider angle, zooming in and out, and the free laughter of it all.
Also vivid in my memory is my elderly friend, Bob Upton’s face, suffused in laughter. Bob was telling me that he had inadvertently caused his wife of fifty years to be swarmed by bees. Bob, who I knew from church, must have already been 90 at the time, and still driving around the city to take care of his bee farm. Earlier that year, he had been moving his honeybees. Somehow, one of his bee pallets broke, opening up to release a buzzing fury into the world. His wife, Doris, stood right in the line of their escape. But Bob had his hands full. In that millisecond, his reaction time diminished by old age, he scrambled to free up his hands, and muttered “Just a minute love,” before lumbering over to her rescue. As Bob told me this story, he laughed with relish at the irony of it. Doris had always hated his bees. In fact, she was hyper-allergic to bee stings. Doris was hospitalized for at least a week. As I listened to Bob recount this shocking tale of woe and of mirth, uttered in his rhythmic Australian cadence, something crystallized for me.
Bob Upton and baby Jordan: how similar they are, these extremes. Being very old and being very young, both condense moments into snapshots.
At either extreme of life, you forget about time moving forward or backward. You enjoy the now. Because when you are very young, you have all the left time in the world. And when you are very old, you have no time left at all.
My name, Julia, means “youthful”. It has a latin root, julius, which might be derived from Iulus, the first down on the chin, or “downy-bearded”. How sad that my moniker is attached to something so fleeting. But also, I am permanently Julia— and therefore according to that appellation, I am permanently youthful.
So in this upstream swim against time, I’ll hang on to a little buoy called timelessness, and savor my moments—as do the baby Jordans and Bob Uptons of the world.
My son and nephews, some of whom are more or less impressed by the passing of time at McDonald’s