Where Has All My Cohort Gone?

We all started our public life with school. In the beginning, we were the youngest kids around, and everyone in our class was pretty much our age. Year by year, we progressed and became the older kids in that school, and then the youngest in the next. When we entered the work force, we started out the youngest there, as well.

For me, because I was born just ahead of the baby boom, I was always being chased by a crowd. My first grade class had 15 students and had all of the 1st and 2nd graders in the entire school. When we were born it was the very tail end of the Depression and the beginning of WWII -- people couldn't afford to have kids, and then the men were all overseas. Forrest came along just five years after me, and his 1st grade class had 35 students, met only half days so that another class of 35 could have the room the other half, and was one of two classrooms of 1st graders. That's 140 1st graders, as opposed to the 7 in my class. Admittedly, part of that was that we not only did 1st grade in different schools, but in different states. But, still!

For a number of years, the path in front of me was also full of people. There were older students, then older workers -- and that generation was larger than mine as well. And then one day I noticed that there were very few people in the office older than I was and even fewer my age. The older ones were retiring, but I wasn't old enough for that yet. Where, I wondered, had the people my age gone? They hadn't all died, surely! It puzzled me for a good couple of weeks, until I remembered that my age cohort was the teeny tiny waist between the surrounding cohorts. My age mates hadn't retired and they hadn't died. They hadn't ever been born.

I've been the one of oldest people in my last three offices, and the oldest in one of them. I look around and I seldom see anyone who looks like me. There aren't too many who remember things I remember and like music I like and expect certain things to be true. Younger workers don't use serial commas (as in red, blue, and green) and have used calculators their entire lives (which means that when they make a mathematical mistake there is no voice in their head that says, "That answer isn't possible."). Some of them have never seen carbon paper and don't understand what the problem would be for a woman college graduate to be asked her typing speed in a job interview. They don't remember women needing to get permission from their husbands to use their own paychecks to buy stock. Life has been so different for them. They have never kneaded the dye into the margarine and have no idea that it was once illegal to sell it colored yellow, or at all in Wisconsin. They've never been to a double feature or a Saturday afternoon cartoon line-up. They've never heard of the Movie Tone News.

It doesn't make me feel old, but boy does it make me feel lonely!