The View from Here: My Life in Late Middle Age

The View from Here--Judah Leblang/2021 I’m coming up on another birthday, (my 64th) an occasion I’m celebrating with mixed emotions. On the one hand it beats the alternative; especially in the age of COVID; on the other I am shocked that this –- my arrival in the land of late middle age –- is happening to me. A few years ago, when I turned 60, I threw myself a party to chase away the blues and received a bunch of birthday cards –- some funny, some almost cruel. One friend reminded me that I was entering my 7th decade and was now “older than most houses, trees, and even some towns.” This gave me pause, as I considered where middle age ends and old age begins. According to Merriam-Webster, the middle years last from 45-64, though now that I can see ‘65’ barreling toward me like a bullet train racing through the French countryside, I want to expand the definition to 70 or even 75. But who am I kidding? I am not in the middle of anything, unless I live to be 120. And though my family name, Leblang, literally means ‘long life’ in German, men in my family tend to die young, a karmic joke or a reflection of God’s twisted humor. At least I have plenty of company. The US Census Bureau reports that the late 1950s formed the peak of the Baby Boom, that huge post-WW II generation that stretches from 1946-64. Growing up in the 1960s and early ‘70s, my classmates and I watched the older Boomers have all the fun we couldn’t. They streaked naked across campus, lit up their joints, protested against the Vietnam War, and grooved to the beat at Woodstock, while my prepubescent friends and I could only listen to the album, tittering at the dirty words and wondering what we missed. By the time I graduated from high school in the mid-1970s, Vietnam was over, a failed experiment. We tipped into the ‘me decade’ and my peers were right with them, focusing on getting high and then moving into high-powered careers, or at least a comfortable lifestyle. The biggest protest I saw was during my college days at Northwestern University, when the administration announced plans to raise our tuition to the staggering sum of $5,000 a year, or about $23,000 in today’s dollars. Years, and then decades went by while I wasn’t paying attention. I remember the “greed is good” 1980’s, when one of my students at Boston University’s School of Management cited Gordon Gecko, the Donald Trump-ish character from the movie “Wall Street” as her role model. While I cycled through a series of relatively low-paying jobs: special education teacher, career counselor, sign language interpreter, and semi-employed writer, my cohort were fast-tracking, moving up their corporate ladders, buying houses, having kids. Meanwhile, I wasn’t getting rich, but I did some meaningful work. And I knew that as the Stones sang back in the ‘60s, time was on my side. Fast-forward 30 years and it is those kids, the Millenials, born roughly between 1981 and 2000, who have become the new Yuppies with their Snapchat and Instagram accounts, their penchant for text messaging, and their inability to talk on the phone. So, where does that leave me, leave us? In 2016, the Pew Research Center cited Census Bureau projections, which predicted that Millenials born between 1981 and 1996 (Pew’s definition of the Millennial generation) would outnumber Boomers sometime in 2019, as more young immigrants come into the country and the oldest Boomers, now past 70, continue to die off. The survivors, I suspect, are determined to stay active, vital, to not get old in a society that both fears and denies the final act. My generation behaved, believed, and hoped that we could avoid the fate of our Depression-era parents, that we would be immortal. But Father Time gives each of us our allotted share, and more of those ‘60s trendsetters zaare checking out, no longer the focus of my teenage envy as they deal with the messiness of physical and mental decline, a reflection of what’s to come. I am a 60-something man watching the years pick up velocity like Newton’s apple, accelerating with the force of gravity and the weight of time. I feel that weight pressing on my chest and etching new lines into my face. By now, my cohort and I know that the river flows in only one direction. Today, if I squint my eyes, I can see the end -- though I don’t really want to look.