Category Archives: age

acquaintances, age, friends

Friends and Acquaintances

9 Comments

One of the interesting things about getting older is that the range of friends and acquaintances keeps expanding. It gives one a wider perspective on the world as the range grows, probably making it possible to be a better friend as time marches on.

When I was in my twenties, so were most of my friends. There were some exceptions, mostly professors and business colleagues. But when it came time to have people over for dinner or otherwise socialize, the group was mostly of a similar age.

As the decade of my thirties passed, the range widened. I now had friends in their twenties and some as old as {*gasp*} their forties. People in their fifties were part of a strange and outre world that just barely intersected my social life. (Or who threw the really good business parties!)

Needless to say the range of friends continued to blossom through the decades. Now that I am in my fifties, I have friends that range from their twenties to their nineties. And I find I like the breadth of view points that brings to my life. It also makes me wonder what kind of an idiot I was in my younger years not to intentionally seek out friendships with those of dissimilar ages at that time.

How about you? Have you found your circle of friendship ranging further afield as you have matured (Sounds so much better than aged, doesn’t it?)?

I’ll leave you with this picture of a few friends sharing a good laugh a few years ago.  I am the only non-octogenarian in the picture. From left to right: myself, a well-know rancher and conservationist, and the person least constrained by social convention I know (and also the most likely to make any party memorable).

age, writer's challenge

Writer’s Wednesday

9 Comments

Mama Kat just keeps on issuing the Writer’s Challenges. This week she offered the choice of these tasks:

1.) Describe your significant other’s most attractive quality (on the inside).

2.) Tell about a time you stole something.

3.) Choose a poem you like. Take the last line and use it as the first line of your own poem. (creativewritingprompts.com

4.) Write about a scary encounter with one of your old professors.

It took a bit of pondering to decide which of the topics I wanted to tackle. The poem was first off the list. Even though I have had poetry published, it was more a mistake on the editors part than any ability on my part. Suffice it to say, you don’t want to read my doggerel.

Stealing was the next possibility to go. I lack anything of interest to report. I may have stolen a tee on the golf course at some time (by accident), but that is the height of my career in larceny.

That leaves waxing poetic about L or writing about scary old professors. I don’t have many scary encounters with professors to report and I have a hard time narrowing my view of  L down to a single quality. What to do? What to write about? I guess I’ll go with the professor story.

Some background. I was ready to graduate in 3 years from the ivy league college I attended as an undergrad. But … the college had a one year proficiency in a foreign language requirement for graduation. I had started off by taking Russian since it could be useful in my area of study. That was a fiasco. The professor kindly gave me a D for the course if I agreed to never again take a Russian language course. So the next attempt was Latin. That fared no better.

You should understand, I knew at least 30 different computer languages at that time (more now). I could absorb a computer language in days. I just could not learn a foreign human language. Things were getting a bit desperate for me. It is spring and I’ve already been accepted to graduate school with an assistantship, etc starting in the fall. But it is all contingent on actually graduating. In spite of the language debacles, I will still graduate cum laude if I can just get my foreign language proficiency.

Fortunately for me, the college was a pioneer in foreign language immersion as a rapid method of teaching languages. So I went to visit John Rassias , the professor who founded the program to see if there was any chance of saving my posterior. He believes that if I go to one of the off campus immersion programs, I can come back at the end of the summer and test out of the proficiency requirement. Thus I would graduate and head off to graduate school, etc. So off I head off to the School for International Living for immersion in French over the summer.

Time passes and the end of the summer arrives with me back on campus to test for proficiency. Since I only have two days to be on the way to the other coast for graduate school (if I do indeed graduate), it is decided that the French department will convene a panel to test my proficiency. Immersion programs concentrate on spoken language, so the panel exam is going to be in oral format conducted entirely in French. The next morning at 10am my future is going to be decided by three scary old professors giving me an oral exam in French. If I pass, I graduate and leave for grad school by 2pm that day. If I fail, … Needless to say it was a tense night for me.

At 10am, I walk into the room to face three professors. John Rassias is anything but scary. He reminds me of a big friendly grizzly bear. One professor is the chairperson of the French department. She has the sternest visage of any professor I have ever had (that might be my memory colored a bit by stress). The final professor is an avuncular looking gentleman who turned out to have the sharpest tongue I have every experienced. The exam starts with John giving a background to the whole problem and laying out the task before the panel. Fortunately I can follow the whole conversation and the questions from the rest of the panel (I think to this day that John was speaking slowly for my benefit). I interject the appropriate Oui! and Non! to the questions asking if I understood the process. And then the exam began.  After an hour and a half of intense questioning and conversation, the panel begins its debate. At least 20 minutes is spent listening to the panel argue, in French, as to whether I should pass or not. Do you know how stressful it is to listen to your future being discussed in a language you are still uncomfortable in, hoping you didn’t miss something that was important, and answering the occasional volley when a new area of probing is suggested by the panel? I do. At noon I finally walked with shaky legs and a signed proficiency letter to give to the registrar. But first I had to find a restroom.

In looking back, the whole experience made graduate school easy for me. My thesis qualifying exam and even my orals were trivial compared to the stress of my French oral. Having been through that experience, I never again worried about facing a test or thinking on my feet. It also was the real beginning of my comfort in talking to public audiences. After all, what is a crowd going to do to me that a panel of professors didn’t.

Now on to something more fun to reward you for putting up with my meandering story. Here’s a chance to see how old you really act.  I came out with this smiling fellow when I tried it:


You Act Like You Are 23 Years Old



You are a twenty-something at heart. You feel like an adult, and you’re optimistic about life.

You feel excited about what’s to come… love, work, and new experiences.

You’re still figuring out your place in the world and how you want your life to shape up.

The world is full of possibilities, and you can’t wait to explore many of them.

Not too bad other than guessing 30+ years wrong on the age. How did you do?

age, cell, distance, IM, relationship

Telephones, IM, Relationships, and Age

1 Comment

This article in the  New York Times had an interesting remark in passing:

“… But today, married women are more likely to spend late hours at the office and travel on business. And even for women who stay home,  cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging appear to be allowing them to form more intimate relationships, marriage therapists say. …”

So it would appear that there are changes in relationships moderated by cell phones and instant messaging.

The last ten months has been an interesting time in my life relative to the above thesis. My wife has been in the process of opening a new business 3+hours drive from here. Thus she lives in another community during the week and we see each other only on the weekends, and not every weekend at that. Thus we spend a fair amount of time on the telephone (we are neither one big IM’ers, although we do exchange some email). The phone, in general, is not an implement well suited to conveying emotional messages, especially for our generation which grew up with the expensive AT&T monopoly during our formative telephone years.

By way of example, when we were in college, we could, if we kept and eye on the clock, afford to call home for five minutes once per week or less. Now with cell phone minute plans, it is easy to talk whenever and for as long as the spirit moves you. Unfortunately, I am not sure the old once a week method didn’t lead to a better emotional connection than the every day anytime method. With the once a week call, you planned ahead, both parties arranged for the time to be free of distractions, and you very carefully mentally edited the topics of discussion to convey the emotional message most important to you at the time. Now with the anytime call, there is a lack of that planning and the addition of the random interruption factor as well. It can be very disconcerting when one is eager to convey something that is exciting and interesting and you either get shuffled off to voice mail or you get the other party but they are tied up and all you get is the old “I’m tied up right now with ABC. I’ll call you back when its over. Bye.”

The current situation is interesting because I can remember going through a similar thing in the early years of our married life when I was in California and she was in Illinois. Then the change in the AT&T monopoly was just starting and long distance was still very expensive (and cell phones but a gleam in the future with the first email message not due to be sent for a year of more). Thus it was the once or twice a week phone call rather than the call on spur of the moment. It meant that many upsetting events in day to day life were elided from the conversations. It also meant that the ambush phone call where one spouse or the other desperately needs emotional support *right now* didn’t occur often and when they did you knew it was a very serious issue.

Now we can call each other at any time. Unfortunately, we both spend a lot of time in meetings with the ringer turned off. Thus we have adapted to a modified version of the old methods where we generally call each other at the same time every day. There are sporadic extra calls as things come up that need to be discussed. I suspect that if we were thirty years younger in our twenties, the patterns of contact (including IMing) would be completely different. What do you think? Does the presence of cell phone and IM really constitute a difference in the intimacy factor in relationships? Is the change for the good?