While figuring out a set of dates, I realized that when one of my clients was my age, I WAS NOT YET BORN. Then I realized that was true for ALL my clients: when they were my age, I was not born. Isn’t that weird to think about, that the caregivers who will care for us in our elderly years may not even be ON THE PLANET yet?
The DOCTORS who will care for us in our elderly years may not yet be here! They will be born, they will be potty-trained, they will go through the many years of elementary school and middle school and high school, they will go into college and then medical school, they will do all those other years of training, and they will do ALL of that long after we were already full-grown adults doing our full-grown-adult thing. No wonder older adults peer suspiciously at their young whippersnapper doctors. This child was so recently in diapers; why does she think she can lecture me about my cholesterol? I had cholesterol before she was even BORN!
The time will come when even the president is younger than us – for some people that is true right now! Our bosses will be younger. I used to be younger than the parents of my students. Then I was the same age as most. Now I am getting older than most of them. It is a very odd feeling!
THE PRESIDENT NO. That can’t be right.
I’m just squeaking in at younger than our Prime Minister. My sister is older than him, and she and I are only 14 months apart!
When I talk to my mother, her favorite phrase seems to be cropping up more often: “…and he looked about TWELVE.” **said with heavy disdain**
The checkout clerk was twelve. The genius bar guy was twelve. Her orthopedic surgeon was twelve.
I think it must be fascinating to be a teacher. You keep getting older, but the kids in your classroom never do.
This, surely, is the single best argument around for spending on things like, you know, education. Because the doctors who will be performing surgery on us when we are in our 70s may as I type be learning, say, how to count? And I do want them to ace the AP Biology test, and a bunch of others things as well.
Yes. I love this way of looking at it, Alexicographer. :)
My patients are at the opposite end of the age spectrum – I’m a lactation consultant. The first thing I see when I log into someone’s chart is their name and birthdate and every time I see a mother with a birthdate in the 1990s I think “that’s not right!”. I had a mother with a birthdate of 1999 the other day and I was thinking it’s only a matter of time (literally) before the kids born in the 2000s are having babies and that just seems so wrong!
Oh man, yes. I’m one of those people who still think the 90s was 10 years ago.
Ha! Me too!
Emily, just wanted to give you a shout-out and say, thanks for doing your job! My lactation consultant SAVED ME when we had our daughter. So thank you for your efforts — I think back with gratitude to this day.
You almost want to make me start blogging again.
I love this post. I love thinking about this stuff. Related: my late grandmother was born in 1911, and there were still a fair number of guys alive who had fought in the CIVIL WAR when she was born. As a child, she knew people who had fought in the Civil War! Or, my dad’s favorite time in history was the 1870s, and he was born in 1944 and as a kid, thought the 1870s was forever ago. But now there is about the same time elapsed from the 1870s to his birth as from his birth to the present day. Timey-wimey stuff is crazy.
Indeed. My grandfather was born 14 years before your grandmother — 6 years before the Wright Brothers flew their first plane — and at some point it occurred to me that when he said, “I don’t like traffic lights,” that wasn’t (necessarily) just a generic complaint — he could remember a time when there WERE no traffic lights.
That is mind-blowing.