THIS WEEK IN AMERICA
Nobody actually tells you when you get old.
There is no letter.
No government department quietly updates your status.
Your children don’t gather around the kitchen table and explain that, after careful consideration, the family has decided you are no longer young.
It happens much more subtly than that.
One day you’re driving to get a haircut, flicking through radio stations, when you hear a Supertramp song.
Excellent.
Finally, somebody is playing some decent music.
Then you hear the station call sign.
Hippy Radio, playing your favourite golden oldies.
I’m sorry. What?
Apparently, while I was busy raising children, moving countries, paying bills and generally getting on with life, somebody moved the definition of “oldies.”
Nobody consulted me.
In my head, oldies are still songs from some distant historical period involving enormous wooden stereos, orange dining chairs and greenish carpet.
I know this because we actually had the orange dining chairs and greenish carpet.
But that’s beside the point.
Supertramp is not oldies.
At least it wasn’t until the radio informed me otherwise.
The strange thing about being 52 is that I don’t wander around feeling 52.
I’m not entirely sure what 52 is supposed to feel like, but presumably this is it.
Most mornings I still feel fundamentally like the same person I’ve always been. There isn’t some older bloke occupying my body and issuing instructions.
Then the outside world provides evidence.
Music is particularly ruthless about this.
Songs you remember being released start appearing on classic stations. Albums from your youth have anniversary editions commemorating numbers of years that seem mathematically impossible.
Eventually you hear a song and think, “I remember when this came out.”
That sentence alone should probably come with reading glasses.
The unsettling part isn’t really getting older.
It’s watching things that still feel contemporary in your memory become nostalgia for everybody else.
There is a difference.
I don’t hear the music of my younger years and think, “Ah yes, a fascinating artifact from another era.”
I hear it and think, “Turn it up.”
The historical artifact, apparently, is me.
Having young children was supposed to protect me
So I thought I’d found a loophole.
I have two young daughters, Georgia and Brianna, which means contemporary culture arrives in our house whether I request it or not.
I know who Olivia Rodrigo and Ariana Grande are. You can even hear me occasionally playing some of their songs on piano or guitar while the girls sing.
For brief periods, this creates the reassuring illusion that I remain culturally current.
Then they start talking about Squishies.
If you haven’t encountered Squishies, congratulations.
They’re soft foam objects that you squeeze.
Then you watch them slowly return to their original shape.
That’s essentially the business model.
Naturally, one Squishy is never enough. They appear to multiply around the house when nobody is looking.
There are Squishies shaped like hamburgers, hot dogs and various other foods.
There are even sticks of butter.
Yep, a foam stick of butter.
Thousands of years of human civilization brought us agriculture, democracy, antibiotics, air travel and the internet, eventually allowing us to reach our ultimate destination:
squeezable butter that cannot be eaten.
My daughters love them.
This is one of the interesting things about being a parent at this age. You don’t completely lose touch with youth culture because youth culture keeps being dumped on your kitchen counter.
You simply become an observer rather than a participant, or the one that pays for it each time you walk past Five Below.
Then your childhood becomes ancient history
The girls delivered another reminder recently when I decided to introduce them to Home and Away.
For Americans unfamiliar with it, Home and Away is one of those Australian television programs that doesn’t really require an introduction if you grew up there.
It began in 1988.
When I was growing up, it was simply part of the landscape.
Summer Bay. Alf Stewart. Teenagers experiencing an extraordinary number of personal crises for people living beside such a beautiful beach.
It was there after school.
It was there year after year.
More importantly, it is still on television.
So I thought I’d introduce my American daughters to this important piece of Australian culture.
They weren’t impressed.
It was, I was informed, “too old.”
Too old?
It’s still on!
I wasn’t asking them to sit through a flickering black and white newsreel while somebody played a piano in the corner.
This is a television show that is currently being made.
Unfortunately, there is a flaw in my argument.
When your father introduces you to a television program that began 38 years ago, you are entitled to ask questions.
I don’t particularly care for that mathematics, but I acknowledge its existence.
There’s something fascinating about showing your children the culture you grew up with.
You’re not merely showing them a television program or playing them a song.
You’re handing them a tiny piece of your own history.
This mattered to me.
This made me laugh.
This was normal in my house.
This is what Australia looked and sounded like when I was growing up.
Then your child looks at it with absolutely none of the nostalgia attached and effectively says:
“Yeah. Bit old.”
Children are excellent at historical perspective.
Famous children should not be allowed to become adults
There is another particularly aggressive way the universe reminds you how much time has passed.
Children you remember from television become adults.
I recently discovered Honey Boo Boo had turned 21.
She can legally walk into a bar in America and order a drink.
This is just not on!
Certain people from television are supposed to remain permanently frozen at whatever age they were when we first encountered them.
Macaulay Culkin should still be defending his house from burglars.
Kevin Arnold should still be trying to work out what Winnie Cooper thinks of him.
Honey Boo Boo should definitely not be old enough to order a cocktail.
The problem isn’t that these people age.
It’s what their aging reveals about us.
If the child you remember watching on television is now a fully grown adult, all those years happened to you as well.
Celebrity birthdays therefore become less like entertainment news and more like unsolicited medical information.
I have decided not to investigate this phenomenon any further.
Then I saw the other side of getting older
Eventually, I arrived at the haircut that had started this entire crisis.
Since moving to America, I’ve generally had my hair cut at Sport Clips.
Even after eight years in the United States, I still appreciate how simply American the entire concept is.
You get a haircut.
You watch sport.
Why should these activities have ever been separate?
The only obvious flaw in the business model is the absence of a bar.
At the location I visited, roughly a dozen televisions were showing sport, but none of them provided the main entertainment that afternoon.
A young boy was having an absolutely spectacular tantrum because he did not want his hair cut.
Not mild resistance.
This child had taken a position.
There would be no haircut.
Negotiations had failed.
Diplomatic relations had broken down.
Scissors had apparently become an instrument of oppression.
His poor grandmother was attempting something every parent eventually attempts: reasoning with a small person who has absolutely no interest in reason.
I remember those years.
You can present a three year old with a seven point argument, supporting documentation, photographic evidence and independent witnesses.
They will listen carefully to the entire presentation.
“No.”
Watching this unfold, something occurred to me.
My girls are past that stage.
I don’t have to wrestle somebody into a haircut chair anymore.
There’s no carrying a screaming child out of a shop while avoiding eye contact with everyone watching.
I don’t have to cut food into precisely the correct shape only to discover that today’s correct shape is different from yesterday’s correct shape.
I don’t have to negotiate with tiny terrorists over shoes.
Suddenly, getting older didn’t seem quite so terrible.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question about getting older
We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying not to get old.
Buying products promising to make us look younger.
Celebrating people who somehow don’t appear to age.
We joke about aching backs, grey hair and needing to make the font bigger on our phones.
I understand all of it.
But sitting in that barber shop, watching a grandmother conduct peace negotiations over a haircut, I wondered whether we’ve made aging sound like something that simply takes things away.
It gives you things too.
Perspective is one of them.
At 52, I know myself considerably better than I did at 22.
I care much less about impressing people who aren’t particularly important to me.
I’ve had different careers. Moved countries. Raised children. I’ve made good decisions and spectacularly questionable ones.
I’ve accumulated enough life to know that many things that seem catastrophic while you’re living through them eventually become stories.
Some even become funny stories.
You also begin to understand how temporary the stages of life really are.
When your children are tiny, it feels permanent.
The sleepless nights feel permanent.
The tantrums feel permanent.
The toys covering the floor feel permanent.
Then one afternoon you’re sitting in a barber shop watching somebody else negotiate with a screaming child and realize that part of your own life quietly ended without you noticing.
There wasn’t a ceremony for that either.
That’s the strange thing about getting older.
We notice the things we’re losing because they’re obvious.
The grey hair.
The younger face.
The ability to stand up from the floor without making a noise.
We don’t always notice what we’re gaining at the same time.
I don’t actually want to be 22 again
This may be the greatest revelation of all.
I’m not particularly interested in being young again.
There are certainly things I’d happily borrow from my younger self. His metabolism would be useful.
His knees wouldn’t hurt.
He also had considerably less white hair.
But would I actually trade places with him?
Probably not.
He hadn’t met my daughters.
Hadn’t lived in America.
He hadn’t experienced most of the things that eventually made him me.
Getting older isn’t something happening instead of life.
It is life.
Perhaps the trick isn’t desperately trying to remain young.
Perhaps it’s remaining interested.
Keep listening to new music even if you still think the old stuff is better.
Let your children explain whatever bizarre thing their generation has decided is important.
Try new things.
Pay attention.
Keep being surprised.
Keep finding things funny.
Just don’t become the person who decides everything worthwhile happened during the twenty years when they happened to be young.
I’ll accept 52.
Even the white hair.
I’ll accept that Home and Away began 38 years ago, although I reserve the right to complain about it.
But Supertramp being classified as golden oldies?
No.
There are limits.
If somebody wants to send me an official notification that I’m old, that’s fine.
Just make sure they include the cardigan.
I’ll probably need it.
Prefer watching instead? This entire identity crisis began with a perfectly innocent drive to get a haircut.
If you enjoy these stories about an Australian slowly trying to make sense of America, parenthood, getting older and whatever else life decides to throw at me, you can support From Down Under to Down South through Buy Me a Coffee. It helps keep the videos, articles and podcast coming, and I genuinely appreciate everyone who helps make this little corner of the internet possible.
