Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
I enrolled in college at 41. I did not wear Tommy Hilfiger. Things unraveled.
Nov 24, 1999 | Aging is a strange thing. In the mirror I see nothing different from what I've always seen, but a number of years ago, supermarket checkers and other impertinents started calling me "ma'am." They think they're being polite. I want to tweak their heads off.
The first thing I learned in my first college class was who I am. Oh, in the abstract I know who that is, of course. I'm 41 years old, married, childless, writer. I started working fresh out of high school and have worked ever since. I talked about going to college eventually, but who knew 23 years would elapse before I did? In fact, who knew 23 years would elapse at all?
For the most part, I have done a fine job avoiding any confrontation with my age. Generally, I surround myself with a mirror of peers who reflect back at me faces just like mine. By opting not to have children, I have managed to avoid placing myself in the role of elder. I work at home, so I don't have to deal with a workplace of fresh young things, as I did when I worked at a newspaper. It's been five years since I left that job and I vividly remember the annual intern season. Those flocks of pretty young people bubbling with naive enthusiasm always made me feel like Ed Asner.
And so by exercising well-established avoidance techniques, I created for myself a cozy delusion that I am, really, as young as I feel -- usually pretty young.
Then I started college.
Not just that, but signed up for daytime classes at a community college, which probably makes the experience a lot more like high school than I imagine a university would be. Community college feels like time travel back to my Wonder Years. Couples cuddle in stairwells, kids cluster in hallways comparing grades, classmates hurry to finish homework before the teacher arrives.
Fashion accelerates the time warp. Schoolgirls today look a lot like they did in my day, with long, straight, center-parted hair, big bell-bottom jeans and tiny, shrunken T-shirts. At any moment I expect my best friend circa 1975 to pop out of the girls' room and talk me into cutting class.
My first few weeks at college, I was confident, even cocky. Sure, the kids surrounding me could tell I was no teenager, but certainly they also saw my inherent coolness. I was not their mother, I was them, only a little older. I wore the right bell-bottom jeans, the right clunky shoes. I didn't, like one older student I saw -- older, even, than I -- wear T-shirts with sparkly big-eyed kitty cats on them. I knew better.
I was smug as only the young can be.
I was pleased to note that although most of my classmates were not even fetuses the last time I sat in a classroom, I was at least younger than the teacher, a genial gray-haired fellow with a grand Texas belly that preceded him into the room. My delusion was maintained -- I might be old, but I wasn't that old.
I made myself comfortable in the second row and was befriended by the nice young man who sat next to me. He was older than the youngest in the class, but nowhere near as old as me. I was flattered that he seemed to have singled me out as the type of person a guy might want to sit next to in a 7:30 a.m. algebra class. Of course, I told myself. I'm not nearly as decrepit as 41 sounds.
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