Jack Gould: Untitled [elderly women inside old house] (c. 1950)

" …when I was still considered too young to engage in any of this shit."

For most of my most formative years, I was too young. I excruciatingly slowly outgrew my youth to eventually qualify for many of the activities from which my youth had excluded me. I was granted certain dispensations. I was granted the opportunity to ride my bike six miles uphill every predawn morning, delivering newspapers, when I wasn't quite ten yet. This was because my year-older brother was also vying for a route, and mine would make one less drop for the distributor every morning. Once I began getting granted opportunities from which my youth had early exempted me, I began to appreciate the even then ancient adage cautioning against being extremely careful about what I might wish for. I was proud to have a paper route before I was allowed to have one, but then I was expected to pull my weight as if I had already turned ten.

Being old enough didn't provide the payoff I had anticipated. Being old enough brought a few unwanted responsibilities. I could no longer feign youthful incompetence. My dad had me stoking the coal furnace stoker before I could hardly heft the scoop shovel, and fishing out the flaming cinders to spread on the driveway to provide traction in winter, long before I should have been considered trustworthy. I became an inextricable part of the family machine, with each member owning their assigned responsibility, and nobody ever given dispensation to revert to their earlier childhood role again. I became TooOld to get away with begging off performing the very chores I'd once ached to perform. Life eventually becomes indistinguishable from irony.

Now I find myself at the other end of the timeline. Rather than being too young for some things, it seems I'm suddenly deemed too elderly to be engaging as I had. I didn't see the restrictions coming. At my advancing age, I'd really rather sit in the shade and sip beers, but certain imperatives continue invading. I learned, once I'd come of age, to squelch my youthful idleness and become obsessed with meeting certain objectives. I plumbed the depths of guilt, imagining punishments for acts never undertaken. I learned to be responsible, a form of guilt intended to keep yards mowed and raked in season. I'd learned what it meant to be an adult, and these lessons do not unlearn themselves. The distance between adulthood and dotage seems infinitesimal and might not be worth measuring at all. There have always been knowings not worth learning or retaining.

Now, the questions once framed as Too Young seem to have been reframed into TooOld territory. I know no better what I'm TooOld to be doing than I ever understood or respected what I was once deemed too young to engage in. Truth told, I'd really rather be seated at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving, and I always would. I see no particular leverage in being deemed old enough to engage in anything. It might be and probably remains only forgivable to be deemed too something, then still engage as if either too young or TooOld were mere fantasy. I expect myself to faunch at every artificial barrier to entry I encounter, and barriers to entry only ever come in synthetic forms. None seem credible when viewed from an other than the Too perspective, once framed. I remain too young for any of this shit, yet not too old to be engaging in any of the insanity I still expect myself to satisfy. Maybe I'm timeless or ageless or just as full of shit as I was when I was still considered too young to engage in any of this shit.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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