Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips

Author:Christopher Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2001-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

SO OLD?

It is early spring and a group of thirty-six seniors and children are gathered around a long rectangular table in a well-lit and spacious seminar room in Montclair, New Jersey. At 2 P.M. sharp, third-grade teacher Brenda Saunders arrives with her students in tow. They have walked over from their elementary school, about a hundred yards away. All of the seniors—regular participants at various Socrates Cafés I’d helped establish at local coffeehouses and senior residences—have already arrived.

In all, there are eighteen younger folks and eighteen older folks. And there is me, somewhere in the middle, but most definitely edging closer in age to the older folks. In an unabashed act of social engineering, I have arranged the seating so the children and seniors sit in alternate seats. I know that none of the younger folks have met any of the older folks who will be taking part. Yet from the moment they plunk themselves down in their seats, the younger folks and older folks begin talking to one another—between gulps of lemonade and bites of chocolate chip cookies—as if they were long-lost friends.

When I began inviting older Socrates Café participants from throughout the area to take part in this dialogue, to a person they told me they wouldn’t miss it for the world. One told me, “You’re giving me a chance to learn from our youngest teachers.”

When I ask for a question to discuss, Helen, one of the older folks taking part, looks perplexed. First she puts her hand up, but then she puts it down. Then she puts it up again. “I have a question,” she says.

“Okay,” I say.

“The other day I told someone I was taking college classes, and then, when I told her how old I am, she said, ‘You’re not so old,’” Helen relates. “At the time, what she said didn’t bother me. But now I wonder what she meant. I wonder if she even knew what she was talking about. I mean, I’m wondering…how old is ‘so old’?”

“Who can answer that?” I ask.

Tia’s hand shoots up immediately, even though her mouth is half filled with a cookie. “‘So old,’” the thoughtful third grader says, “is, like, when you’re around a hundred.”

“Why do say that?” I ask.

“Because when you’re ninety you’re old, and when you’re a hundred you’re so old.”

“So it seems you’re equating ‘so old’ with ‘really old,’” I say. “So…why is it that a hundred is ‘so old’ and ninety isn’t?”

“A hundred just sounds right,” she says, affecting a seraphic grin.

“It just sounds right,” I repeat. “Hmmmm…Let’s see if we can get some others to help us.”

Her classmate Alex can hardly contain himself, so anxious is he to pitch in right away. “If you’re young, even ten is very old or ‘so old’ to you. If you’re forty, then sixty is old to you,” says Alex, who is by far the tallest student in his class and looks to be at least two years older than he is. “So whether something is ‘so old’ depends on how old you are.

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