Human Condition: We are the gray tribe, we are many and we do extraordinary things

I am sitting in life’s cosmic AARP theater section, chuckling about my senior discounted ticket and complaining about the uncomfortable seat.

The lights go down. What, no previews? “The Wunderkinds'” opening credits roll, and a panoply of youth appears. There’s Mozart playing the harpsichord at 3; his music will be published by age 5. Bobby Fischer is winning a world chess championship at 13. “Fingertips,” a No. 1 single in 1963, is being recorded in a Motown studio by 13-year-old Stevie Wonder. A shot of a Barcelona gallery displays 14-year-old Pablo Picasso’s art.

I shifted my bulk in the seat. What was that creaking noise? Seems it wasn’t the seat. We seem to be thoroughly, hopelessly fascinated by youth. I understand why, but I find it infinitely more compelling when more seasoned folks do extraordinary things. Can they turn the sound down and make it warmer in here?

What about the flip side of what I see, I muse. Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer at 64 and Harland Sanders was 60 when he ignited the deep fryers and loosed fast fried chicken upon the land. Neil Young, George F. Will, Martin Scorsese and Bob Dylan still have gas left in the tank, though, alas, Dylan is even more unintelligible, if that’s possible, than he was in the ‘00s. And on and on.

I have, perplexingly, become older. Not just a little older, but Medicare older, retirement older, who is this old cat in the mirror older. Though I am a child of the Nixon/Carter years, I’m not yet in the get-off-my-lawn sect, nor do I cavil to anyone who might listen, even strangers, about current hairstyles, (I thought we were way past that), manners of dress, and abstruse language. Though I am invisible to the younger set, mind you, I hold no contempt for them. In fact, they are sharper, more open minded, less materialistic and more tolerant than those of my vintage.

Do these observations mean that I have fallen into an “us and them” crevasse? Can this be tribal? We do seem to be entrenched in all things tribal nowadays. What separates us, where is the line? It’s certainly not as simple as a number.

The generational differentiator is, of course, experience, which obviously accrues over time, penciled into one’s credit column, building until the synapses fire more slowly and locomotive capacities wane. And then the debits mount. We are scarred, having survived the Red Menace, 1968, Watergate and disco. But until the accounts run dry, we still got juice, this tribe.

So I wonder, do we need a word to counterbalance wunderkind? Surely such a word exists in the lexicon. I reach for my smartphone to Google because that’s what one does, yes? The blue screen glows brightly and antonyms for wunderkind appear as expectation, imbecile, normality and regularity. Did I type in the correct words?

Phantom credits roll. I rise stiffly from my seat in the darkness, metaphorically amble toward the exits and step into the light. A thought occurs. How about wunderaltere — wonder old person? Or perhaps simply legion, for we are many.

“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.”

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Clifton lives in Baton Rouge.

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