James Watson said that. The co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix and Nobel Prize winner was in Toronto years ago when someone asked him what (I think he was 80 then, not the 96 he is now) was his secret for staying young?
Watson’s point, of course, was to force yourself on younger, suppler minds so that your own doesn’t harden like peanut brittle.
Avoiding old people when you’re old yourself is hard, in the way that avoiding booklovers is when you’re a booklover, hot-rodders when you’re a hot-rodder, and alcoholics when…all to say, elephants like to sleep with elephants.
Indeed, we live in an apartment building in downtown Toronto that’s been designated a NORC, a naturally occurring retirement community, and I have to tell you, the place is crawling with them/us.
So in 2019, in our own effort to avoid spiritual sclerosis, we decided to do something about this slow rot. Like much else, it got interrupted by COVID, but we’re resolved to do it again this coming year and beyond. True, we’ll be five years older. But what did that man say? “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Once more, we’re going to host the Killer Young People’s Dinners, the KYPDs for short.
Four times a year, we’ll invite a dozen women and men between the ages of 30 and 40 to come and have dinner with us.
We will know a few of these kids, but most of them will be complete strangers until they knock on our door.
We’ll recruit most of them from where we did last time: the Young Turks supporting our favourite hospitals, libraries and arts groups. This says they’re bright, ambitious (hence Killers) and generous with their time and money. They’ll join us because they’re intrigued, but also because they’ve been suggested by someone more senior they respect or fear. We’re not really looking for diners whose first names are Tad or Muffy, but rather Kumar, Gelerah, or José.
What we learned in 2019 we’ll likely re-learn in 2025: even though they’re complete strangers to one another, our guests will make their own connections, both fast and deep. They’ll also drink more than we do, and stay later than we ever would. Our job is to set the table and sit back and watch.
As with life itself, back in 2019 we really clicked with some of these young people; others not so much. A few of the 40 who joined us over those four dinners we’re still close to, and still others we are happy to forget we ever met. We hope they all learned that you can still be ‘in the game’ when you’re in your 70s and 80s. And we learned that some of our most cherished assumptions aren’t assumed at all by them. Own your home? Ridiculous. Raise kids? No thanks. Drive a car? How 20th century.
The diversity experts all tell us to force connections across our gender and race.
I think it’s time to do that by age as well. And by that I don’t just mean visiting an old person in a retirement home. I mean actively forging connections across the vast gulf between generations.
This is especially important for older people who are not yet frail, but active, and are many years from that last sad place where kindness forgets, love comes undone, and families drift apart.
We believe the cure for oldness is boldness.
So we’d be thrilled if you started your own dinners. They don’t have to be fancy. They don’t even need to be dinners. But once a season, we urge you to force yourself on strangers who are 20, 30, even 40 years younger than you are. You’ll likely find what we did. They do things differently there.
Meanwhile…
1. Learn one big thing every week. Tom Whitwell has been producing his “52 things I learned this year” since 2014, filled with odd facts and sage advice, such as…“In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5. [Our World in Data, via Boyan Slat].”
And if you’re a philanthropist like Dambisa Moyo, you can learn one big thing each month… Or you can score big on the science quiz of the year.
2. Tips for the holidays: 1. You have permission to be miserable. 2. You can build an electrically-heated table. 3. You can drink less. 4. You can get out in the snow and make art. Or you can endure a romantic dinner. 5. And to all you transplant surgeons out there, don’t do this at home.
3. Documents of the Year. Here’s the U.S. Congressional report on former Congressman and former nominee to be America’s Attorney General, Matt Gaetz.Yech. (see pages 13-16). And here’s Blake Lively’s complaint of sexual harassment against Justin Baldoni. (see pages 2 and 3). What a bleak tale.
As counterpoint to both, we offer the 2024 Wildlife Comedy Awards.
4. It’s 11:58:30 on the Doomsday Clock. The University of Toronto’s Janice Stein just wrote a piece for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the possibilities we’ll all be vaporized next year.
Meanwhile, an argument for staying alive on Earth is, Mars sucks.
But we could always flee to the moon.
5. Sunshining the dark secret world. Let’s applaud people like Ron Deibert and Eliot Higgins. Diebert heads the U of T’s Citizen Lab, the world’s foremost digital watchdogs, and his new book, Chasing Shadows, uncovers how cyber espionage threatens democracy everywhere.
Higgins runs Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence platform that pries into bad people, worse places, and terrible things.
6. Everything old is new again, again. From “Singin’ in the Rain”, and James Bond posing in The National Gallery, to an iconic hotel reopening, sandcastles in the air, and surgeons boosting their creativity.
7. Only in Newfoundland. Three times this year robbers have plowed heavy pieces of machinery into businesses to steal cash from ATMs. As The Globe and Mail noted, “Newfoundland appears to be an epicentre for backhoe banditry.”
8. Things to do next year. 1. Wander. 2. Pray. 3. Pun. 4. Rain cats and dogs (mainly dogs). 5. Bask in the emotions of probability. 6. Stop men mansplaining.
9. A wonderful life. The one version we all know, with Jimmy Stewart. Here’s another, with Victor Brombert who died last month at 101 and was described by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the glories of humanistic scholarship.” Brombert was one of The Ritchie Boys, yet another heroic group we barely know.
10. What I’m liking. Cirque du Soleil’s wonderful T’was the Night Before on stage at Meridian Hall at Front and Yonge. We saw it before Christmas (it runs till Jan. 3) and it’s everything you love about Cirque, i.e. great acrobatics! and more. Tickets here.
Plus Netflix’s Emilia Pérez. Not the usual Mexican drug cartel chop-you-up-into-little-pieces love story.
Plus the Jan.18 concert by Toronto’s newchoir with music from LGBTQ+ artists like Elton John, Chappell Roan, Teagan and Sara, George Michael, Judas Priest, Pet Shop Boys and David Bowie.
P.S. I’ll be taking a break from the OG blog next week. So, the next edition will be January 11th. Happy New Year!