Just Seventeen...

   Not long ago, the movie Yesterday appeared depicting an imaginary time when most of the world had never heard of the Beatles.  And for some reason I can remember the band's use of numbers..."just seventeen" (I Saw Her Standing There), "twenty years ago today" (Sgt. Pepper's), and the iconic "when I'm 64."  And lest one forget, there's also the Paul Simon song about Old Friends saying, "how terribly strange to be 70."  While reflective of aging (and no, I'm not quite there yet but the gap is definitely narrowing) all those references became that much more evident when the doorbell rang.  We all have those moments as we grow older, that impatient waiting just to turn 18 or 21, and then you're suddenly 30 which is soon followed by 40 and (for those of you not there yet) 50 zooms into the picture even more quickly (what????).  But I never expected to say to someone, "I haven't seen that person in 50 years."  And with that simple sound of the doorbell, I was suddenly staring at two people I could say that about.  When I tell people this, they are at first aghast then pleased, then puzzled as if mentally calculating just how old I must be.  After all, 50 years ago seems astronomical as if we were just going to the moon or something; you can picture this when someone shows you a photo of a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary and they seem, well, old, almost grandfather-like (at least, those were and for the most part are, my impressions).  But then I did the math...if someone got married at 18 (and had somehow stayed married), their 50th anniversary would put them right at age 68.  Wait, that was me!  And I wasn't old, or at least not old enough to have lost the ability to kid myself that I was, gulp, old-er.

Gulp, one of my old school classes

    So here I was, sitting with two friends from high school (soon to have a third join us), along with their spouses, sharing stories both old and new, each of us seeming to defy time by sharply recalling near-ancient memories and building new ones.  Backgrounds emerged and faces began blending into nebulous forms of genetic takeovers; we were now showing those glimpses of our parents in a quirky smile or a certain gait.  And as that conveyor belt of life rolled on, we all remarked that our long-past generations, those mothers and fathers of our grandparents (the "greats") had left us.  We seemed to know next to nothing about them, just as our children's children would soon come to know next to nothing about us.  Who's that in the picture, grandma?  Why, those are my friends from 50 years ago.  Oh...a shrug of the shoulder, a feint of interest, then onto the next picture, that memory and moment destined for the landfill of life.  But no matter, we were all here now, as different and yet as similar as so much of the world, feeling blessed and fortunate to be able to once again join up and conjole, to laugh and reflect and celebrate as if we were young again.

Various snowflake shapes; photo: Wilson/Bentley

   Of course, we were among the fortunate ones, the ones still married and comfortable and healthy and still able to have our "wits about us."  We glanced at a few old pictures but soon realized that all of us were well on to a new part of our lives.  Time had moved on without blinking and somehow we were all still here, meeting spouses and going on hikes and unintentionally discovering that we could still stay up until the "wee hours."  And outside, the weather was warming a bit, the snow melting just enough for our shoes to get somewhat of a grip, to crunch as we walked along a path.  And in that way, we were each a bit like snowflakes, unique and yet just part of a mass so dense that once we parted ways we would prove indistinguishable from any other.  And just as with snowflakes we were hard to replicate, something I found equally fascinating because snowflakes come in shapes and sizes that stretch way beyond the typical hexagon "no two alike" format.

   Here's how Quartz put it: The single, crystalline objects you think of as snowflakes are usually called “snow crystals” by scientists to distinguish them from flakes formed by several crystals lumped together, which you can also call a polycrystal.  They begin with a seed, like a speck of dust or pollen, because pure water remains liquid down to -46℃ (-51℉).  Water condenses and freezes around the seed on its downward journey, passing through atmospheric changes that give each one its structure...Dendrites, for example—the fern-like formation most of us associate with snowflakes—form at higher humidities and either high or moderately low temperatures, but not at moderately high or very low temperatures.  Needles form at moderately high temperatures and higher humidities; plates form at lower humidities and at high and moderately low to very low temperatures, but not moderately high temperatures...When water molecules are lumped together, hydrogen atoms from one molecule are attracted to the other molecule’s oxygen atom.  The most efficient resulting shape is usually a hexagon, although the closer you look, the more complex the physics gets.  There are exceptions to the rule of six, but they still follow a mathematical logic of three or twelve sides; pentagons and octagons aren’t possible.  Geology explained it another way: Although all snowflakes have a hexagonal shape, other details of their geometry can vary. These variations are produced by different temperature and humidity conditions through which the snowflake falls.  Some temperature/humidity combinations produce flakes with long needle-like arms.  Other conditions produce flakes with wide flat arms.  Other conditions produce thin, branching arms.  These different shapes have an unlimited number of variations, each representing the conditions of temperature and humidity and water vapor the snowflake encountered during its fall. 

    Author Joe Pinsker asked in his piece in The Atlantic, when does someone become "old?"  In 2016, the Marist Poll asked American adults if they thought a 65-year-old qualified as old.  Sixty percent of the youngest respondents—those between 18 and 29—said yes, but that percentage declined the older respondents were; only 16 percent of adults 60 or older made the same judgment.  It seems that the closer people get to old age themselves, the later they think it starts...“I’d argue that the reason there isn’t consensus about a preferred term has everything to do with ageism rather than that the terms themselves are problematic,” Elana Buch, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, said in an email.  “As long as being ‘old’ is something to avoid at all costs (literally, ‘anti-aging’ is a multibillion-dollar industry), people will want to avoid being identified as such.”...So if 65-year-olds—or 75-year-olds, or 85-year-olds—aren’t “old,” what are they?...Once people are past middle age, they’re old.  That’s how life progresses: You’re young, you’re middle-aged, then you’re old.  And yet here we all were, not worried about being seniors or elderly or mature or, heaven forbid, geriatric in our "golden years."  We knew that we weren't "young" in that sense, but we also knew that we were lucky, lucky to be able to gather here at a dinner table and not at a funeral or a hospital bed; lucky that we could tell our stories of kids and grandkids and yes, our travels.  We had all grown up in a rather innocent time, a time when even reaching out to hold a girl's hand fluttered your heart with anxiety and took two or three dates before you gathered up enough courage to do so.  "Old" fashioned, for sure; we had become that picture of a 50th anniversary...

   We were lucky to have also caught one of the last performances of a dance production, to have met in a group and do so without worry, to have been able to sit comfortably in a restaurant before everything began shutting down.  Airlines, ships, recreation centers, theatres, bars, weddings and in some cases, even funerals.  The Covid-19 scare was bringing the preciousness of life to the forefront.  This long-overdue reunion may have been our first, or our third, or our last; who knew?  National Geographic titled one of its covers "The Last of Its Kind."  It was a piece that talked of animals and humans and basically life itself and how perhaps we have taken all of it for granted.  Said part of the piece, "If we lived in an ordinary time—time here being understood in the long, unhurried sense of a geologic epoch—it would be nearly impossible to watch a species vanish...But of course we don’t live in an ordinary time."  These were indeed not "ordinary" times, and now the world --and all ages-- were beginning to wonder just how long life of all sorts would last.  My small gathering of early classmates had been lucky to peek back at our innocence and to look forward to a new journey; friendships had remained and new ones had begun...life was continuing.  But we were well aware that we were the fortunate ones.  Times were indeed changing, even as we watched the world united with the launch of Apollo 11.  But then that was 50 years ago as well.

    It was now a time to think and to reflect.  All of those precious moments, all those times we thought would never end and yet, here we were 50 years later.  We were lucky and we knew that, just as we knew that many both before and after us were not so lucky.  We had all come from poor beginnings, growing up with dirt roads and living in shacks or public housing for the most part.  But we had somehow all made it to this point.  We were aware that life goes on somehow, always evolving, always not blinking, always asking us to just appreciate what we have now.  Noted the article: The last mass extinction, which did in the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, followed an asteroid impact.  Today the cause of extinction seems more diffuse.  It’s logging and poaching and introduced pathogens and climate change and overfishing and ocean acidification.  But trace all these back and you find yourself face-to-face with the same culprit.  The great naturalist E.O. Wilson has noted that humans are the “first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force.”  Many scientists argue that we have entered a new geologic epoch—the Anthropocene, or age of man.  This time around, in other words, the asteroid is us.