You Can Be Immature Forever

Today I was reminded again that I am not getting younger.  A young co-worker and I were riding the bus together on our way to a staff meeting when a man even older than I asked if we're father and daughter.  We were both a bit weirded out by this and I especially as I thought, well, I will be fifty-eight in a month and my co-worker is I think in her early thirties?  Of course.  The other day, responding to my inquirer about a Spanish language partner out of the many Latino tenants in my building the manager in an email suggested that the young women might not be comfortable with me, and he didn't say, because you're an old man, but of course it was said anyway.  I responded with, here is ageism raising it's ugly head again.  Of course he is probably right.  A lot of young women are creeped out about old men because, well, we are old...and men.
     I would be glad to work at Spanish or anything else with a gal young enough to be my daughter.  And I sometimes do.  Or with a gal old enough to be my ex-wife, or old enough to be my ex-mother-in-law (even though I've never been married!)  Or it could be with a guy.  Of any age.  I don't care.  For a close friend, un amigo de confianza as we say in Spanish or a trusted friend I would prefer someone older, mature, not because I have anything against the young but because I trust the wisdom of age.
     Don't get me wrong.  Youth is beautiful.  There is a fresh, new and unspoiled quality about the young.  A promise of a new start.  There is strength, beauty and health that has not yet been ruined by poor diet, no exercise and too many years of cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.  And there is that unjaded, uncynical openness to life and possibility, often made ridiculous by naivety and idealism but really isn't this part of the charm of youth?  But young people can also be incredibly headstrong and arrogant because they have not been tested, because their cute flawless little asses have not yet been properly kicked.  They can be judgemental and tunnel-visioned and incapable of empathy or of appreciating a different point of view.  They can be downright dogmatic.  I think this is often why Anglican churches are often full (well, less than full in this age of religious decline) of people older than fifty while evangelical warehouse churches are brimming with young folk.  Anglicanism encourages thinking, inquiry, an opening of the mind and a grounded capacity to hear and listen without making judgements.  None of these qualities will be found among the evangelical community churches.
     You're young only once but you can be immature forever.  Youth looks dreadful on anyone older than thirty no matter what this era of legislated immaturity might say about thirty being the new twenty.  Now that I'm older and my thinking is clearer and more objective I very seldom see anything in people younger than thirty that I find attractive.  They all look to me like large children, somehow unripe, incomplete.   This is not envy speaking, by the way.  It is relief.  I'm finally past all the storms and greenness of youth though my heart still feels young like a laughing and dancing child.