Ranjona Banerji | 27, Don’t Be Scared Of 70!

“Can you imagine us years from today/Sharing a park bench quietly?/How terribly strange to be 70.” Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s album Bookends, which contains the song ‘Old Friends’, was released in 1968. They were 27 at the time. At 27, anything above 40 seems terribly strange and old. That’s the age of your grandparents.

Which is why these old friends are sitting on park benches, surrounded by flying newspapers, dust, sunset and a city trembling all around but far away from them.

At 70? Nah.

That’s how much things have changed from 1968.

At 70 today, you might still be working, in some form or manner. You probably ought to be doing something, not just believing rubbish on the Internet and forwarded to your phone. If so many of the global politicians who rule our lives and make us miserable can be over 70, no reason for the average citizen not to be out and about as well. Not making everyone miserable, obviously. There are better things to do.

The first is to break the old mould of the old person. The knitting grandma, soft and cuddly. The pipe-smoking grandpa, gruff but find. Across cultures there are variations of this trope. Which used to be sort of true at some point in time. But today’s 70-year-olds are the Internet generation. Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web is 71. Today, anyone with a smartphone, regardless of their age, uses the Internet.

But this is not a lecture. I should start where I wanted to start. With a story. A story about how you can rediscover friends, as you grow older and as your life settles down to new routines. So many, caught in the large net of life, family, work, obligations, lose touch with those first friends who saw you through your early days. Who knew your first grazed knee and wiped the tears caused by first crush. Old friends, in fact.

There are so many stories of how old school friends have found each other, often through social media platforms. And it happened a bit like that for me as well. Some of us met after years, since we left school over 40 years ago. And for some of us, it was like we had never been apart. We picked up where we left off. Gathering threads, retelling stories, laughing uncontrollably and sharing the life we had lived in the interim.

There is a comfort like no other in old friends. They’ve seen you shine and at your most vulnerable. There is the mutual contempt for the bad teachers, and the recounting of all the crazy things teachers did to us and we did to them. No one else can understand those tales and there’re not half as funny without context and the feeling of being there.

Some of us travel together, a perk of growing older and being free of responsibility. It’s wonderful the way we all find our levels. A massive plan of endless sightseeing sounds exciting when you make and frighteningly tiring as you get closer to setting your alarm for some unearthly hour. Not all grandmas like to wake up at the crack of dawn any more. Maybe they never did and just had to be forced to conform to stereotypes. Mine hated waking up early, actually.

So as the thrill of ancient architecture wanes and one fantastic sculpture starts to merge into every other, you offset the history lesson with a little retail therapy. Suddenly, no one’s that tired anymore and even the person who swore they’d never buy anything has succumbed. A busy day turns into a long evening of food and conversation. Comforting and sustaining, till you have to get back to the real world.

If you’ve not yet remade these old connections, don’t leave it too late. Although, on the other hand, my late father, when he was in his 80s, reconnected with friends from his bachelor days, when they had all started working and used to share rooms and chummeries. The gales of laughter as they looked back on the vagaries of youth were enough to thrill even the stoniest heart. So, maybe any time is a good time.

Let’s not forget new old friends, who seem like you’ve known them all your life. These too add to the spice of your life and you can give two hoots to anyone who thinks you’re too old to have fun. That’s another form of comfort, where you just fit into the crannies and edges of each other’s life. And make new discoveries about each other and yourselves, without the burden of old encrusted preconceived notions.

I do have one friend though, my closest, and she’s not given to large group outings and hectic holidays. We planned together our old age as bookends, sitting on our park bench like the song says. The trouble was when we embarked upon it some 15 years ago, we laughed at the older people in the park until we realised they were all younger than us. It was an eye-opener even though we laughed even more. Judgmental of us it was, because our dress sense had not yet matched our age. Even if our hair and wrinkles gave us away!

So maybe she and I will find ourselves “silently sharing the same fears”. Although neither she nor I are very silent. And while 70 is not that far away just now, the park bench is not going to appear to us for many more years yet.

The answer though perhaps is not in age or years lived. It’s in finding friendship and laughter with all ages and types, so that you enrich the present. There’s nothing to prove any more, no promotions to win, no raises to get, no contracts to fulfil, no corner offices to covet.

It is just terribly strange to be 70 and full of regrets and missing out on life. And that’s a lesson for the oldies as well as the young people out there.

Right? Right.