We’ve seen a lot, and know things young people don’t know yet, know too that most of them don’t feel like hearing them, either…much of the time don’t, in fact, even tend to see us. We’ve worked we’ve kept house cooked, cleaned, handled family holidays we’ve cared for ailing relatives battled our own health problems. We’ve had marriages and divorces, raised sons and daughters, have grandchildren and daughters and sons in law. Women my age have gone through so many similar experiences that by this point, similarities far outweigh differences. In some ways it feels like a return to my early childhood, when I lived in a scruffy DC neighborhood and had as many black friends as white. With Johnnie and me it took years before we were able to peel away the various barnacles and crustifications and get down to simple, one on one friendship.īut in the situations above, our age-our mutual, senior age-seems to melt away all the extraneous, socio-economic-whatever-generated racial crap that so often stands between people with different shades of skin. But in no case was the connection forged with the same direct ease, the same immediacy as the situations above.
This fact makes no difference at all.Īs a young woman, I knew and worked with a number of black women some I became close to one, my late friend Johnnie, was a friend for years. In each case, the lines of connection are forged in an instant the exchanges are brief, comforting, satisfying. Isn’t there anyone around to read these two the riot act? These kids today get worse and worse. Great, now we have to deal with these idiots. We exchange no words whatsoever, instead conduct an entire conversation with minimal movements of mouth, eyes, brows. A woman my age is seated directly across from me our eyes meet. I am riding on the subway when two young teenage boys burst into the car, bristling with energy, laughing, swearing, thrilled at the possibility they could be seen as threatening. This, this is what brings them out these days? After all the civil rights marches, the anti-war demonstrations, this is the sort of event that galvanizes them? We shake our heads, in perfect harmony.Ĭ. I back up, and find myself standing next to a woman my age whose expression reflects my own almost exactly we immediately start talking. They are simply waiting for an Apple store to open so they can buy the newest technological toy. An air of sharp expectancy is in the air for a second I am shot back to the protest movements of my youth. I am walking down a street in Washington DC when I come upon a crowd of young people, standing, sitting, congregating. Is this nuts? Wouldn’t you think-? They go to all this trouble and then this is the best-? Can you believe it? It just goes to show…ī.
We fall instantly into one of those senior women exchanges that need no introduction, no explanation, involving head shakes, eye rolls and perfect connection. Clearly the woman my age standing a few feet away is in a similar situation. I’d love to help, but there is no way I can fit in the room. I am waiting outside while my daughter in law attempts to attend to my grandchildren, one of them a newly trained two year old whose bathroom requests are ignored at one’s peril. Sumptuously renovated, that is, in every respect but one: the restroom is tiny, jammed, totally unequipped to accommodate the constant flow of visitors. I am standing outside the rest room near the children’s section on the ground floor of the main Brooklyn Public Library, a sumptuously renovated palace of soaring ceilings and gold inlays. | A Provisional Dictator in Cairo » ABC of Race & Gender By Judy OppenheimerĪ.
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