Friendship across generations

Blurring the age lines (and I don't mean wrinkles)

I've always admired my parents' variety of friendships. In particular, friendships across generations.

Recently I hosted a heartwarming (well, it warmed this heart, at least) reunion of the book club I ran for my now adult daughter and her friends. (For those of you following the link, note that I am behind in updating the book list. The current one goes up to 9th grade.) We started the club (that they cutely named "Page Flippers") when they were in 3rd grade. They are now in their second year of college, scattered across the country and beyond, and during the Fall semester they asked me via our WhatsApp group chat if we could read a book together and meet up at my house to discuss it, like we used to do. I nearly melted.

These fantastic young people have my heart. For over ten years we met nearly monthly in my living room. I saw them grow up. When they were fourteen, they read my book, Faint Promise of Rain. We discussed so many other books and topics—fiction, poetry, memoir, short stories, mystery, "classics", war, racism, fantasy, independence, incarceration, autism, the Black Panthers, you name it—as they piled into my living room, giggly eight-year olds who became long-limbed teens leaving their phones in the phone box by the door, and who are now out in the world doing amazing things.

Last month, during their winter break, we read and discussed This is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar (a complex, layered, confusing but brilliant and oh-so-gorgeously written slim novel that skillfully blends sci-fi, romance, and mystery). Over our tea and snacks, which included blueberry pancakes as featured in the book, conversation drifted to worries about finding summer jobs, what to look for, where to look, how to handle that age old conundrum of you need work experience to get a job but you need a job to gain work experience. One of them also was struggling to find artists in publishing who might visit their zine club.

I had some ideas on how to help them, and so I sent out some feelers by email and social media and I referred to a "young friend of mine" I was trying to help. I paused when I wrote this. I wondered if I should change that to "a friend of my daughter's" or "a student I know" but neither of those felt entirely right. They were correct, but they were missing something. This is someone who shared, over ten years, a lot of thoughts and feelings with me, with our book club. Someone I took on a three day trip to visit colleges in New York. Still I hesitated. Would my daughter think it was weird that I was referring to one of her good friends as a friend of mine? Surely this young adult would refer to me as my daughter's mother, maybe as “Anjali,” but likely they wouldn’t use the word "friend." But there comes a time when those lines get blurred.

I remember the first time I heard my mother refer to a friend of hers who I later realized was my age. And that didn't make me feel weird. Instead, I was delighted. Granted, I didn't know this person directly, but I appreciated that friendship can most certainly cross generations. And it should. That should happen more often. Our society is too segregated by age. It places such a premium on youth and pushes older people to the sidelines when they have so much to offer. A doctor friend of mine recently said to me: "The more wisdom I have to impart, the less people listen to me." She said it in a matter of fact voice, but it made me sad.

Photo by Janosch Lino on Unsplash

My parents are in their mid 80s and they have dear friends in their 90s, and of course of their age, and also in their 70s and 60s and even 50s. They all qualify as friends of equal standing. As my parents' child, I'm grateful that younger people consider THEM as friends, and look out for them, and enjoy their company. I have teachers and mentors twenty, thirty, forty years older than me who have become dear friends. I hope I can play that same role in the lives of my children's contemporaries.

It's such a shame that our society feels it necessary to create senior housing that houses only seniors. It's not good for them, and it's not good for the rest of us. Children should be interacting with elders. Here in the West we live separately. (With some lovely exceptions.) No family compound. No extended family under a single roof. If we are lucky grandparents come to visit, or we visit them, but there is a lack of continuity, a gap in one's knowledge of the daily life of the other, so that some conversations can feel too complicated, demand too much explanation, and so we avoid them, and thus know each other less. Video calls and chat apps of course have lessened that gap, for those who have access to them and can operate them. But still. All generations need a reminder that "old" doesn't just mean aches and pains and groans and forgetfulness and an inability to operate new technology. It also means perspective, patience, and creativity. It means incredible stories. Wisdom. Am I saying this because I just passed the half-century mark? Maybe. But I've believed--known--these things for a long time.

Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash

I urge everyone to cultivate friendships across generations. To have friends from each decade in life. Teens have much to offer us. So do young adults in their 20s and 30s. People at the peak of their careers in their 40s and 50s. People who have experienced seven or eight decades of the world. People who were born nearly a century ago. Forget about age categories and staying within them. Blur those lines. We'll all be the richer for it.