May 2023
By Richard Fleming
We are each accompanied by our personal crew as we travel down the road. By crew, I am not talking about family, friends, and loved ones. These folks are our anchors. By crew, I’m referring to the people who provide expertise and logistical support as we navigate the path ahead. You know who I mean. Our team. Our plumbers and electricians. Our doctors and dentists. Our physical therapists. The photographers we hire for special occasions and the auto mechanics who keep us mobile. The pest control experts we call in when ants survive every elimination method known to Google. These folks make up our crew. We rely on them. None of us can hike this trail alone.
A peculiar facet of aging is that as we grow older, our crew grows younger. I don’t intend this statement to be humorous or metaphorical. It is simple mathematics. There is an inverse relationship between our upward trajectory in age and the downward trajectory of our crew members’ ages. It can be plotted on a graph.
When I was young, my crew consisted of folks much older than me. I still remember my pediatrician, Dr. Greene, who had graying hair, appeared to be very smart, and smelled like cologne. Dr. Welch, my dentist, did the best he could, considering he had arthritic fingers and I rarely brushed my teeth. My school teachers were knowledgeable, many decades my senior, and taught me well. My crew’s advanced years were reassuring virtues.
As I journeyed onward, my crew seemed to grow a little younger. In retrospect I now realize this was an optical illusion created because I was growing a little older. I still needed my crew. My wizened college advisors and medical school faculty did their best to help me chart a course forward. After I graduated, my senior work mentors distilled lessons that saved me years of effort.
My crew provided invaluable help in other areas of daily living as well. When my land line was on the fritz, I called in a telephone repair person. When my car’s warning light turned on, I relied on an auto mechanic. Backed-up toilets which resisted my fraught attempts at plunging and snaking required a plumber. Whenever I needed my crew, they would show up. Most of them were older men. A frequent phenomenon was that after completing the work, the repair person would end the visit by cracking a joke about old codgers or referencing some cultural quirks from two decades before I was born. I did not find their jokes funny. Apparently I was too young to understand them. Even though I was in my 30s.
It was when I reached my 40s and 50s that I discovered my crew had mysteriously become about the same age I was. My personal physician and dentist were both around my age. When I needed a plumber or electrician, the person who showed up usually looked to be similar to me in age. The upslope of my aging line appeared to cross the downslope of my crew’s aging line. And I now began to understand the jokes that crew members liked to tell after finishing their work. Their sense of humor was generationally concordant with my stage of life.
During those years I was occasionally surprised when a crew member looking a couple of decades younger than me showed up. These folks made me nervous. I was skeptical about their expertise and knowledge. How could a gastroenterologist that youthful possibly perform a competent colonoscopy on me? When I had to see an oral surgeon to remove a lesion, he was clearly too young to have completed dental school, much less specialty training. It was disorienting. Where were the crew members around my own age? The ones with the right balance of education and experience.
But life is filled with twists and turns. As I grew even older, my crew continued dropping in age. Simple mathematics, remember. Addition and subtraction. And this is where things get strange – in my 60s I began to feel more confident and secure with younger crew members than with the older ones. I became mistrustful of auto mechanics, window cleaners, and other crew members who looked to be as old as me. I was worried not only about their stamina and skill, but their cognitive abilities as well. If a dentist had as much gray hair as I did, how competent could they be, after all? Surely that older plumber’s agility was questionable, so how would they be able to fix my garbage disposal? (My older brother, a psychiatrist, would label my mistrust a form of projection.)
Now that I’m in my 70s, I no longer encounter any crew members who are around my age. To a person, they are younger. Some much younger. But I have confidence in them. My prior skepticism of young crew members has disappeared. My youthful team has the requisite vigor. Their cognitive abilities are intact and likely better than mine. I am happy to engage with these youngsters. They help me navigate as I move forward.
My about-face in who I most trust to support my journey reflects my maturation as the years tick by, one after the other.
But there is a downside to this evolution. I find that once again I do not understand my crew’s end-of-visit jokes. Apparently I am now too old. It is hard to find memes comical when I don’t even know what a meme is. How can I understand humor directed at celebrities or musicians I’ve never heard of? And how I can be expected to laugh about funny trends on TikTok that apparently everyone has heard of except me?
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Very nice post! There is another advantage of a younger crew that I hesitate to bring up. The last time I had a tooth filling done by Dr Greene I was about 14 or so. He looked and acted a bit tired. I learned he had an MI and died about two hours later….. and truth be told that filling only lasted about 6 months. Wish I had known enough to say “Hey Doctor Greene, is something wrong?” and get him some help if he would take it.
Meme? What’s a meme?
Perhaps you mean nene. But then what’s so funny about a Hawaiian goose?😂😂
Good one, Richard!
Personally, I subconsciously address this issue by convincing myself that I’m younger than my actual age. But that’s another matter.
This is an absolute delight. I particularly like the sentence about how, in our 40’s and 50’s, our crew members mysteriously become about the same age as we are. I remember so well first puzzling about how that happened…
Thanks for this.
My Endocrinologist had retired and very young doctor had prescribed something for me that sent me into liver failure. I was informed that I had to get a new doctor. So, I talked to the medical assistants, and they recommended someone to me, and I made an appointment. When the new doctor walked into the exam room, I took one look at him and said to myself, “Well this one won’t retire before me! He has now been my primary care physician for 14 years and is no longer taking new patients!