I recently came across two quotes that seem to go hand in hand. One is from E.B. White, a famous American writer and author of Charlotte’s Web, the beloved children’s book. “Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.” And the other is from Alan Alda, the actor most known for his role on the TV show “Mash.” He commented in an interview “I think of old age as an acting thing. Right now I’m playing an older guy with less hair. So, that’s fine. I’ll play that part.”
I can understand these men. I am constantly startled by how old I am. I will see a sign on a building bragging it has been in business since 1980 and I think, ‘Big deal that is not so long ago.’ Then I realize that, yes, it is. It is 40 years ago, almost half a century. Yet it sounds like yesterday to me. I look at my teenaged grandchildren and wonder how we got here. They were babies just minutes ago. Filling out birth dates on computer forms means scrolling down and down and down to get to the 1940s. When will the computer simply get tired of us, and erase those years completely?
This is what those who are not in our age bracket do not understand. As we creak into a room, tunelessly humming a song only we recognize, underneath it all we are still 19. We look at that spouse or friend who is equally old, but we see only the young man or woman that we fell in love with, the dear friend of our youth. In our eyes they have not changed. For while the bodies may have altered, the eternal essence of their hearts has not, and it is heart that governs everything.