I visited downtown Denver’s new clothing store, H&M, for a shirt, maybe a coat. Pants.
I didn’t anticipate walking away with nothing but a head full of whispers.
You don’t belong here. This no longer is your tribe. Find your people, Douglas.
I’m 46. . For most of this vague, somewhere-in-the-middle blob of adulthood, I identified with the youthful side of the balance, with the people who carouse in the evening, who might ride a cruiser skateboard on a Saturday afternoon, who have a certain capability, if not a college-kid fluency, with new music.
I was forever 34.
Youngish.
But I have been kidding myself.
Years ago, I pulled away from the station where guys call one another “bro” or, rather, “brah.”
I’ve been sitting on the oldish train for a while, staring out the window at the heavily barretted moms in yoga pants pushing strollers and the lunch-breaking guys laughing over their weekend of Pabst Blue Ribbon and ultimate Frisbee.
What I failed to understand is my role had turned from youth participant to spectator. My train had left behind one world and entered another. When I watched groups of people banging at their phones with fingers — instead of talking to one another — I wasn’t observing people beside me.
I was looking back.
What is middle age? The U.S. Census pegs it between 35 and 50. Different dictionaries say it straddles 40 and 65. At 46, smack on the dividing line between baby boomer and Generation X, I fall into any definition of middle age, and the idea that it extends to 65 gladdens my heart (which labors more during runs now than I remember from just a few years ago).
It’s not lonely living in the land of huff and puff. In Colorado, nearly 34 percent of the population is between 40 and 64.
But different cliques claim diverse parts of the not-young/not-old island. On one end: Natural American Spirit cigarette fetishists and Tuesday happy hours (that extend way past happy hour). On the other: antacid devotees and Tuesday evening lectures on Front Range geology.
At some point, all of us lucky enough to make it deep into the middle-muddle understand we have forever left behind the Tuesday night martini fests. We thrill, instead, to the prospect of something less antic, a gathering leavened with a sardonic nuance usually lost on those dancing on the island’s sunnier shore.
My half-hour at H&M finally sealed it: I had changed tribes.
Just a few years ago, I shopped at an H&M in New York City. I thrilled to the prices (cheap) and the style. The Swedish clothing emporium had pulled an Ikea. Stuff looked good. Stuff was cheap. Yea.
This time around, I still marveled at the affordability. And I appreciated the clothing; H&M designers have a knack for nailing contemporary without wallowing in trendy. But the only thing I wanted to buy was a pair of gray pajama bottoms.
Pajamas. It didn’t take long for the whispers to emerge, for me to grasp that the place — like many others — wasn’t meant for me anymore, that I was an outsider looking in.
The understanding didn’t come in a flash. Clues about my real — instead of imaginary — station appeared now and again during the past few years.
Hipsters appalled me for a while — the fanciful beards, wallet chains and skinny jeans with boots, the oversize glasses, the painstaking dishevelment — but one day about a year ago it occurred to me: They are just kids. I probably would have dressed and acted like that, were I their age. Be nice, Capt. Grumpy.
I began visiting a website called thesartorialist.com, which is nothing more than bunch of snapshots of people who dress well. Most of the subjects are young and often hipsterish, and I ignored them. Instead, I studied the older gentlemen from Milan or Florence, in tweed jackets and wool pants or dark jeans and fine leather shoes and thought: Awesome.
Restaurants — I no longer visited places that were solely bars — had to withstand a newfound scrutiny. If they were peppered with the oversize-glasses/painstaking dishevelment/fanciful beards crowd, I shunned them. If I looked through the door and saw people wearing backward baseball caps, I retreated. Loud music? What?
And here’s the kicker: I began noticing old guys. Up until my early 40s, old guys were invisible, they were shuffling wraiths complaining about back pain and plotting retirement. I could barely imagine their lives, and why would I want to anyway? I was with the young crowd! The skateboarders! The people who listen to the B-52s and are transported back to house parties … in 1981.
House parties 30 years ago.
Uh-oh.
These same kids with whom I drank cheap beer and danced in parent-absent houses are now creaky of joint, thin of hair, pouchy, saggy, complainy.
Oldish.
So now I encounter a guy who I’m sure is somewhere between mid-40s and mid-60s — this is how I define oldish — and I know we have at least one thing in common: the tribe. Among other things, I know there is a good chance he lies awake at night thinking about stuff like, you know, the meaning of life. What happens when you die? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do now?
I’m with you, brother.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com