So Old, So Young

in which we try to climb the stairs

So Old, So Young

A girl and a boy walk into their teacher’s purse. The purse looks like a plastic chicken. They think they are playing with a plastic chicken, but it’s a purse.

The teacher reacts strongly. “Get out of my purse,” she says from across the classroom. The boy leaves. The girl stands alone. The teacher says to the girl, “I could have anything in there. I could have birth control in there.”

If you haven’t caught the joke, it’s because you do not know the teacher is a woman over fifty.

The first joke is, she no longer needs birth control. The second joke is, if she needed it, don’t worry, there would be no occasion for it, because she is over fifty.

While not a funny joke, the teacher and the admin team have a good laugh over it down in the office, to absolve the teacher of any guilt she feels for having spoken inappropriately.

The perfectly imperfect novel So Old, So Young arrived in a pink gift bag from CVS across the table from a passionrita ordered to celebrate my 61^st. Coincidence? I think not. The young delivery person, my son, asked me what I wanted and I told him.

A romp revisiting “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” So Old, So Young has been dismissed by some as age-related whining of the privileged, but let’s not write it off it so quickly. Had I not decided to skip the Dialogical Self conference in Thessaloniki this year, Grant Ginder’s novel would be a marvelous candidate for exploration over ouzo or better yet, water. Passionrita was not the right call. That’s because the book aims to deliver singular purpose through dialogue, although it may pour like pulpy nectar at first. Let’s see how well this delivery lands on our tables.

Beverages and substances sully several conversations in the book. These choices are on full display in the novel, as the aging friend group orders at the bar, makes it a double, spills and falls into the pool. These are choices all kinds of people make, not just fancy rich people in beach houses. This is why it smacks of public-facing judgment to write off the book as one demographic’s story. So Old, So Young describes all of us.

In today’s New York Times style section, Rama Duwaji, first lady of New York City, is held under a microscope for her fashion choices and whether they cost too much. Fuss is made over purchases that are second-hand or not purchases at all but rentals. Is this a metaphor for that other thing we live in besides our clothing, our homes? I vote yes. Having recently given some thought at a satire conference to the subject of virtue signaling through fashion statements, or “Hitting Pan,” the rush to critique or defend Duwaji’s clothing and shoes gave me pause. Let’s please, for the sake of much more complex arenas than these, not put the accent on the wrong syllable (pron. sylA’ble for those who don’t know the joke). Duwaji is an artist who is allowed to dress herself, as my “I Adulted!” sticker book proclaims. The people in So Old, So Young are allowed to drink free drinks at weddings. Rather than read their social status when they chose to become intoxicated, it is more compelling to read the choices themselves. In a nice gesture anticipating such scrutiny, the book includes a character who wanders into inappropriate spaces all the time. She demands we question the line and then makes us realize we do not all have that luxury. That’s her privilege: that she can go wherever she chooses. That’s an enormous privilege we do not all have. We cannot all do this.

That’s why the book is an edifying read. The author is aware of class and to some extent race and makes conscious decisions regarding white rooms, wealthy spaces and crossing lines. It’s high time English teachers stopped worshipping Gatsby as if every party book since needs to measure itself against a Fitzgerald meter. Countless stories of frolic thankfully do not match that story, stories of social intimacy and disconnect that illustrate and then expand “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” This week I tried to share Jamaica Kincaid’s “Columbus in Chains,” first published in The New Yorker and now available through the magazine’s unshackling of their archives. Many students raised their hands in my open “who hasn’t read it?” policy. Kincaid’s is a tale of intimate small parties without privacy, if ever there was one. Parties where people walk in graveyards and take off their shirts. Parties where we don’t have to sit around and say, “oh he writes such strong women’s voices” because everyone’s a girl, written by a woman, and the odd man out is – guessed it – the Dad droning on in the background making a power play for the omnipotent Mom.

And now for a word or two about omnipotent women unbuttoning their shirts, speaking of distractors in the news. If you haven’t heard the one about the chicken purse, you can file it away in your “Andie McDowell can’t get a date” file. Here’s why – news flash – women will always be omnipotent, and it’s not one of those “she can bring life into the world” adages out there. Flip it, if you will.

You won’t have heard because it goes without saying that a woman is physically constructed to be intimate for her entire life. It’s a mechanical thing. There are a lot of stories you won’t read here reminding us of the mechanical (un)hardships of men. On June 22, 2011, I wrote in McSweeney’s about that day’s news: “Stick a Fork in Weiner” (Daily News), “Weiner’s Rise and Fall” (New York Post) and “In Chaotic Scene, Weiner Quits Seat in Scandal’s Wake” (New York Times). This McSweeney’s column, called “What Men Do,” concerned itself with my child’s response to the news in 2011: “That’s just what men do,” she said.

Let’s be clear like water: I drink my coffee this morning as the coffee of a non-hater, who loves men, women and all my nonbinary friends and family with my whole heart. The novel So Old, So Young, labeled as a book about race and class, might deliver a delicious cup of off-label tea as a book about gender and silent power. That’s the kind of power we could all use a bit more of, our silent power to stop talking and just read already.