When Old Friends Suddenly Seem…Old

      We had lost touch. Old friends but now living in different towns, pursuing different lives, we hadn’t seen each other for quite some time. On a recent trip, we finally reconnected.

      And during that very pleasant lunch, while we ate our sandwiches and exchanged news of our families, updates on what we were doing, complaints about bodily deterioration, remembrances of times past, I couldn’t stop thinking of how old my old friend had gotten.

      When you haven’t seen someone for some time, you notice things. At our age, you notice how old they’ve–seemingly suddenly—become.

It happened several times on the recent trip. I noticed:

      Alan now has a tremor. Eli shuffles when he walks. Ed has more difficulty remembering things. All these old friends had become—indisputably, unmistakeably—really and truly old.

      Not being in regular touch for so many years, I was smacked with what was time’s end result, having missed the gradual process of aging. I hadn’t seen the hair slowly growing grayer and the walk incrementally slowing down and the back, gently over time, becoming more bent.

      The people I had known, the images I had retained, had stronger voices, straighter postures, a faster step and heads topped with a lot more hair.

      I was reminded of when we were kids and relatives whom we hadn’t seen since the last big family affair came to a wedding or a funeral or a holiday party and kept saying how much we’d grown, how much taller we were, how much more like an adult we’d become since they had seen us last. Our parents, of course, all our regular contacts, hadn’t mentioned or noticed any of that. They saw us every day. Our changes had been imperceptible.

      The changes now were very perceptible, maybe because the pace of change had accelerated. While we may not look much different at 50 than we looked at 40, while we may be almost as sprightly at 60 as we were at 50, by the time we are past 60 years of age we are undeniably dimmer renderings of what we were.  

      As, I realized, I was, too.

      So, near the end of lunch with my old friend, it hit me: if I couldn’t get over how much older he seemed to be, what did he think of me? How much older did I appear? What had he noticed?

      Had he noticed that my voice was now hoarse and raspy? That I wore hearing aids—and still had to lean forward to catch everything he was saying? That my bald spot, which had just been breaking through last time we had gotten together, was no longer just a spot but now most of the top of my scalp? That my balance had become a little shaky when we sat down and even shakier when we got up?

      Had he noticed all that? Had he noticed that his old friend also had become … old?