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age




Rick is right.  You will be looked at askew a bit by whoever is different, but
in many cases with age, it's a matter of communication more than anything.  I'm
"lucky" to have always looked a couple years older than I am, and be intelligent
enough to talk equally with college students, even when I was quite young.  This
sometimes backfired, and people twice my age would feel internally convicted.
They would look at their situation and burst into extensive confessionals on how
they wasted their formative years.  I hadn't really strung all those separate
events together until just now, but yes, I suppose that's been a theme.
Fortunately I'm too old and unaccomplished for that now.

I'm coming up on the first time in my life where there was an age group I didn't
consistently "get".  Up until now, I was able to communicate with my own age
because I was that age, with those in middle age because I still have a pony
tail and they think me a bit liberal, and with the W.W.II generation because in
reality I'm conservative, and my parents are of this generation.  Kids outside
my family, and often within, are a bit of a mystery to me.  You can know
everything about child development and such, but it doesn't help that much.  It
seems the magic bullet is being able to identify more than three Pokemon.

One of my nephews wants to be an astronaut.  This desire hasn't faded a bit and
he's in junior high now.  He's very intelligent and determined, so he just might
beat the odds.  Last weekend I was downstate visiting the extended family, and
so I took Jake aside and asked for a sheet of construction paper.  I sketched an
outline of the space station as it looks now, and told him as much as I could
remember about each section.

After about a half hour of this he looked up, wide eyed with wonder, and said
"Aren't you out of breath?".

The brilliance and determination of a twelve year old are often no match for the
attention span of a twelve year old.

Ultimately, I suspect the key to communicating with anyone is a willingness to
listen and give importance to what is said when the speaker feels that the
subject has importance.  It might be GameBoy or Guadacanal, but it's probably
worth learning about.  It's a hug and a warm cup of coffee, as far as the
speaker is concerned, a gentle gift.  Take it with a smile, and if you know
something yourself, so much the better.

But trust me on the attention span.


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