When Do We Become the Same Age?
The moment in life when age becomes a shared experience.
I’ve been wondering about something lately. When do two people become the same age?
Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s easy. When they’re born on the same day. But that’s not what I mean.
When you’re four, an eight-year-old might as well be a grown man. The four-year-old wants in on everything. The eight-year-old wants nothing to do with him. Four years is the Grand Canyon when you’re a kid.
School keeps it going. An eighth grader and a high school senior live on different planets, and they’re only four years apart. Every one of those years is a whole new wardrobe of maturity and nerve and bus routes.
But somewhere along the line, it changes.
Nobody blinks at a 24-year-old dating a 28-year-old. A 30-year-old and a 35-year-old are practically the same person. And by the time you hit your fifties, a 45-year-old and a 65-year-old can sit at the same table, laugh at the same jokes, complain about the same knees, and argue about when to take Social Security. Twenty years, and it stopped mattering when nobody was looking.
What I think happens is that we quit measuring age in years and start measuring it in stages. We stop asking how old somebody is and start asking where they are. Raising kids? Starting over? Burying a parent? The candles on the cake have less to say about it than they used to.
That’s how a room full of fifty-somethings can hold a 42-year-old and a 68-year-old and nobody counts. They’re chewing on the same questions and rubbing the same sore shoulders.
Of course, age doesn’t hand you maturity along with the gray hair. I know plenty of men in their fifties who still laugh at jokes they shouldn’t. If I’m honest, I’m one of them. We’ve got the gray hair, but a lot of us are the same boys who thought a good fart joke was the height of comedy in middle school, and we haven’t been talked out of it.
Maybe wisdom isn’t getting serious. Maybe it’s learning which things are serious and which things were never worth the worry.
So when do we become the same age?
I don’t think there’s a birthday for it. I think it happens the moment we quit counting years and start seeing each other as fellow travelers, all of us trying to figure out the thing with whatever time we got handed.
And if that’s true, we’re all a lot closer in age than we let ourselves believe. That’s about as much arithmetic as a man needs.