Scarf weather update: mustard yellow, thrifted, a little scratchy at the neck. I forgive it because it makes the gray outside look intentional. Johnstown in mid-November comes in one color, and that color is “wet sidewalk,” so I bring my own.
I’m at my window table with a cinnamon latte I didn’t need and fully deserve. Two tables over, a pair of retired gentlemen are trying to settle whether this morning’s white stuff counted as snow or “just flurries.” They’ve been at it since I sat down. No ruling yet. I’m rooting for flurries.
Meanwhile, my phone, which I promised myself would stay in my bag, is out of my bag.
Here’s what the scroll served me this week. Back in May, a fourth grader in Greensboro, North Carolina, did his homework. His class had to write a persuasive letter and mail it to someone who could act on it. He picked his congresswoman, Virginia Foxx, and he picked his own topic: a $5,000 rebate for people who buy electric cars. His teacher tucked in a note asking her to enjoy the student’s hard work and passion.
She wrote back. Her letter told him that money comes out of taxpayers’ pockets, which is a real argument, and a ten-year-old can handle a real argument. Then it told him to ask his teacher to explain propaganda, and guessed that his teachers were too busy indoctrinating him to help him learn to think.
He’s ten. When his mom explained the letter to him, he said that was wrong, because the school didn’t do anything. That might be the steadiest sentence in the whole exchange.
This month, Representative Foxx, who is 83 and has held that seat since 2005, appears to have lost it by a few hundred votes. The count isn’t certified, and she can still ask for a recount, so I’m not calling anything. I’m just sitting here with my latte, thinking about that letter.
My first thought was something like: well, she’s 83. Time to go.
I put my phone face-down after that one. Briefly.
I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks that. Old age is the one neighborhood I fully plan to move into. My mom will get there before me, and I’d like to follow her, scarf and all. The people at the far end of that road move slower than they did in the middle, and they’re also carrying the longest receipts in the room: more winters, more mistakes, more years of watching things go right and wrong. I keep my lists on receipts. I know how much fits on a long one.
Plenty of 83-year-olds would have written that boy the kind of note that ends up on a fridge. My grandpa would have. He’d have disagreed about the electric cars, too. He’d have told you exactly how many miles his Buick ran and how many years it lasted. But he’d have opened with “good letter, kiddo” and then shown the kid where he saw it differently. He’d have taken him seriously.
What I keep coming back to is how shut the letter sounds. It reads like someone who decided a while back that the thinking was finished, so a new idea showing up in a child’s handwriting must have been planted there by somebody else. I’ve met that shut door in people my age. Age just gives it more time to settle.
There’s a lot of talk right now about a big handoff. The older generation is stepping back, and Gen X, millennials like me, and a whole wave of Gen Z are stepping in at once. Handoffs get bumpy. Lately I see people on both ends turning “old” and “young” into teams, the way we’ve turned so much else into teams. I’d like us to skip that one. We have enough teams.
I think the middle years make a good season for leading. You’ve still got your strength and you’ve built up some sense, and ideally they meet somewhere around the coffee pot. The person handing over the keys still knows things about the road. The kid in the back seat with the persuasive essay has something to say about it too.
We can retire an idea without retiring the person who held it. We can say “that thought has run its course” and still pull out a chair.
The gentlemen two tables over reached a verdict, by the way: flurries. The barista, who looks about nineteen, politely disagreed and got the full story of the winter of ‘77, which she seemed to enjoy. Indoctrination levels at the counter: low.
If you’re writing back to someone this week, ten or eighty-three, write back kind.
Stay clean, stay kind, stay caffeinated.
— Heather
