Senior Moments

[steepholm]

As I write this, I’m on a crowded train “rushing” home from York to Bristol. I’ve been staying with Haruka at the house of my old PhD supervisor and his wife, and a nice time we had too. (Haruka has gone off in a different direction, to London, so for now I’m on my own.)

It’s strange being in a place where I spent so much happy time in what must now be counted as the moderately distant past, and that temporal discombobulation showed itself in a dream I had last night. There, I was asked, in some kind of social situation, how old I was. “Twenty-six,” I replied automatically. Even in my dream this sounded a little odd, so my dream-self corrected it: “I mean, thirty-six.”

Then I awoke, and realised the truth - that I was in fact forty-six - or rather (as I became a little less bleary) fifty-six. That was my final bid for the moment, but a very salutary wakening it had been. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that, when I was a York habitue, I really was in my mid-twenties?

My supervisor, meanwhile, who retired a few years ago, was embarrassed two nights ago because he unthinkingly cut the boil-in-the-bag fish he was making for supper out of its bag and put it into the oven on a baking tray. The truth is that it tasted perfectly fine, but he dwelt on his error, until I told him:

“It’s not a senior moment; it’s an emeritus moment.”

The conceit pleased him.

Comments

[poliphilo]

I don't believe I'm ever an old chap in my dreams. When my kids turn up they're almost always still children which would peg my dream-self at about thirty five.

[steepholm]

Mine tend to be young, too. My own age varies.

[cmcmck]

Weird thing is that because of those lost fifteen years I still see myself as forty something rather than sixtysomething and so, it seems, do most people I know. They tend to be genuinely surprised when I tell them how old I am.

I don't know if this is common to people with our life experience?

[steepholm]

I’ve certainly had people tell me that I come across as younger - not necessarily in appearance, nor (or not entirely) in the degree of my juvenility, but in some less tangible way. It’s an interesting question!

[calimac]

I spent my grad school years, at the same age, in Seattle. And for a long time afterwards I felt weirdly transported back to that period when I visited the city. But it seems to have worn off. When I'm there now, I'm still reminded, but no longer transported.

[steepholm]

I suppose the key is to keep the visits sufficiently infrequent...