A Wider Lens

Sunday from the Porch

I have a handful of friends in their seventies and eighties. People are often surprised—or maybe enchanted—by this. They ask about it with a kind of amused curiosity, as though I’ve taken up an unusual hobby. Like I collect them or something.

The truth is, I don’t think I ever set out to make older friends. I just never learned to see age as much of a barrier to connection.

My grandmother spent most of her adult life as a caregiver. After immigrating from Ireland, she built a second family for herself here in the States, many of them older than she was. There were the women she cared for, the friends who became fixtures in our lives, and the relatives who always seemed to have another story waiting to be told. My childhood wasn’t divided neatly into adults and children. It was shared with people who had already lived entire lives before I arrived.

Looking back, I think that shaped me more than I realized.

Even now, whenever I arrive somewhere new, one of the first friendships I tend to make is usually with the oldest soul I can find. Not because older people are automatically wiser (they’re just as varied as anyone else) but because they’ve watched a place become itself. They’ve spent decades watching the same streets, the same people, the same rhythms. Their perspective is naturally wider than mine—not because they’ve seen more of the world, but because they’ve had more time within it. They remember the neighborhood before the new apartments arrived. Before the cafés had lines out the door. Before everyone else discovered it. The traditions that quietly disappeared and the ones that somehow survived. They don’t just know a city; they’ve watched it evolve.

As someone who spends so much of his life moving through places, that’s a kind of knowledge I’m drawn to.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed something else: The conversations I have with my older friends are fundamentally different from the ones I have with people my own age.

My conversations with peers are usually anchored in happenings. Where we’re traveling next. Businesses we’re building. Relationships we’re beginning. Relationships we’re ending. Projects we’re excited about. Goals we’re chasing. The future occupies most of the conversation because, at this stage of life, so much of it still feels unwritten.

My older friends certainly talk about current events and politics and what’s happening in the world. But somehow those conversations almost always find their way back to people.

The friend they’ve had lunch with every Thursday for twenty years. The partnerships and marriages that found evolution instead of ending. The neighbor they couldn’t live without. The neighbor they could. The people they miss. The people they’re grateful for that have never left.

It isn’t that their worlds have become smaller. If anything, they seem larger than mine. They’re simply organized differently.

Relationships have become the geography.

I had lunch recently with my friend Fran, who was my high school art teacher. We’ve been making time to connect for years. Usually once around her birthday in May and once around mine in December. We recently spent a couple of hours catching up before I headed back to Europe. And then, purely by chance, we ran into each other again at the grocery store just as I was leaving town.

As we hugged goodbye, she looked at me and said, “You have no idea how much this connection means to me.”

“Me too,” I replied.

She smiled gently.

“No,” she said. “You have no idea.”

I’ve thought about that moment ever since. I don’t think she was questioning whether I cared. I think she was reminding me that we experience time differently.

For a long time, I assumed I was the one benefiting most from these friendships. I got the stories, the perspective, the local history. But somewhere along the way I realized that friendship isn’t mentorship in disguise. It’s still friendship. Fran wasn’t grateful because she had someone younger to talk to. She was grateful because we had continued choosing one another’s company, year after year.

At thirty-six, I still tend to assume there will be another lunch. Another visit. Another chance to circle back through town. That’s how most of us move through early and middle adulthood. We live as though time is generous.

My older friends don’t seem pessimistic about time. They just seem more acquainted with it.

They know how unusual it is to reconnect with someone after years apart. They know how many people they thought they’d see again but never did. Every return carries a little more weight because they’ve learned, firsthand, that not all returns happen.

I’ve noticed something else about older friends, too.

They’re remarkably poor at pretending.

If the government is failing people, my friend Dona (who is 81) will tell you exactly how she feels about it. If a restaurant isn’t worth the price, she’ll let you know that too.

Fran, after lunch, looked at me for a second and said, almost matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen you with a belly before.”

I chuckled with embarassment.

She wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t seen one before either.

Very few people in my life would say something that direct. Fewer still could say it that way and get away from it unscathed.

It’s flattering to know there is a freedom on her side of the friendship that has outgrown performance. To stop spending so much energy protecting one another from honesty and start trusting that honesty itself is an act of care.

The older I get, the more grateful I become for these friendships.

Not because they give advice all the time. Most of them don’t.

Not because they’ve figured everything out. They certainly haven’t.

I’m grateful because they’ve lived long enough to know what keeps mattering after everything else changes.

I’ve spent much of my adult life collecting experiences. New cities. New countries. New work. New ideas. I hope I never stop. Curiosity has given my life a shape I wouldn’t trade for anything.

But spending time with people who are further down the road has made me wonder if, eventually, our lives begin to organize themselves around something quieter.

Not the places we’ve been. Not the accomplishments we’re most proud of. But the people we’re still calling. The people we’re still having lunch with. The people we’re genuinely delighted to run into at the grocery store.

Maybe that’s why I keep finding friends in their seventies and eighties. Or maybe they’ve been finding me all along.

Either way, they’ve given me something I don’t think I could have found on my own: the chance to see my own life through a wider lens.