Sharing coffee

Gregory and I had coffee at Starbucks on Tuesday, lingering over our drinks for a couple of hours as we talked and watched the University District crowds pass by on the sidewalk outside.

I first met Gregory over four years ago, when he was a high school student living in my neighborhood.  Now he's a sophomore at a university in New York City, back home in Seattle for semester break.  His family moved out of my neighborhood shortly after he left for college.  We've kept in touch on Facebook, but this was the first time I'd seen him in person since he first went back East to the Big Apple.

Our conversation was satisfying -- from my point of view -- from several perspectives.  Gregory's doing well, of course, and seems to be making the most of the opportunities that college and life in New York offer him.  But I knew that already, just from following him on Facebook, although of course I loved the chance to talk it all over with him in person.

But our conversation was also reassuring on some level beyond the personal.  It was reassuring to be able to carry on a serious conversation with someone many years my junior without feeling any need to lecture him from the heights of my great wisdom and experience, and without his feeling (so far as I could tell) any need to remind me how totally out of touch I truly was with today's world.

Partly, of course, I could empathize with his excitements and concerns and worries, because I so easily recalled my own identical feelings at his age.  More interesting, even surprising, was sensing how his concerns as a 20-year-old were clearly mirrored in analogous concerns in my own life.  I may not have to worry about choosing a major, but I have to make similar choices about how to best use my own time.  Feelings of insecurity, some degree of shyness, concerns about one's own abilities, bafflement by politics and by the mysteries of the universe itself --  the importance of each of these may fluctuate as an individual passes through life, but their existence is shared by each of us at some level of consciousness, independently of our age or experience.

It's wonderful to go overseas, talk to a native of the country you're visiting, and realize that differences in language and custom are superficial -- you both share the joys and predicaments of the human condition.  In the same way, it's deeply reassuring for someone my age to talk with a university student and be hit with the same realization.  These feelings of community between oneself and students who are much younger must be one of the appeals of the teaching profession, at least for those who really love teaching.

As I think back, I realize that this sense of community between generations has been one of the great pleasures of the many trips I've taken with young nephews, nieces, and family friends:  to see the world, and our travels through that world, through their younger eyes, and to realize that we mainly shared the same perceptions and excitement -- and that where our perceptions differed, we could both learn by understanding and appreciating the other's reactions.

Finally, talking with Gregory gave me -- as did travel with my young relatives -- an intimation of earthbound immortality.  Even if we can't live forever, we in some sense live through the generations who follow us and who recapitulate our own hopes and fears within the context of their own times.  This sense of immortality is most strongly felt between parents and their children, of course, but it's also felt on a grander scale between one entire generation and the ones that follow. 

So, any time I can be assured over a cup of coffee that -- in some sense, at least -- I'll live forever, it's well worth my spending a couple of hours (of very enjoyable conversation) to get that assurance.