Most people mistakenly think the way to feel young is to be around young people.
The way to feel young is to be around old people.
I drove up to Connecticut this week to visit the retired couple (ex-professors) for whom I was a graduate assistant at Yale twenty years ago. They live in a retirement home near New Haven. He recently turned ninety.
As far as retirement homes go, theirs was quite nice. Yeah, it kinda smelled like old people. Yeah, all the chairs had wheels on the bottom of the front legs so that when you sat down you could easily scoot your chair up to the table. Yeah, it was creepy in a way that all retirement homes are.
But it was good to see them. If you have to get old--and God willing, we will--they have done it pretty well. Too bad there's no future in it.
We chatted for a while about names and places none of us could remember clearly, we had dinner in the dining room with about fifty other old people, then we said goodbye and I drove back home.
But as I pulled out of the parking lot, I looked in my rear-view mirror and briefly thought, "Holy crap, I look twenty-nine."
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