It’s official. I can no longer tell students from teachers. It’s not just because I’m getting old. (I am but that’s not the point this time.) Everyone’s dressed alike.
Here comes the back-in-the-day part: When we Aging Aquarians were in our teens, we couldn’t wait to be adults, so we copied them. We dressed older as soon as we could. We didn’t hate it.
In the 60’s we whipped around with lightning speed and decided to stay forever young. The rallying cry out of protest movements here in Northern California became, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Today, fifty seems to be the outside age some acquaintances are comfortable with. Some have already been fifty for quite a while and staying fifty forever doesn’t seem like such a stretch. It might even be medically possible one day.
Interesting observation. Fifty still sounds old to me even though I passed it nearly eighteen years ago. As a man once said, the definition of “old” keeps moving and that’s just fine with me.
I remember fifty. It felt like such a huge milestone. For me it was maybe just the beginning of growing up.