Young people

I think they liked the chance to be young people and not just young parents. Young people get to talk about old people with a certain kind of superiority — exuberance outgunning experience. If you can avoid all the accidents you'll be in the race longer, and they always say that the winner is the last one standing, and you think that it's probably true, and that this would be a very good strategy if only new people wouldn't keep joining the race. Because your new baby is upstairs in the bedroom and you know she will be standing longer than you, even though she is not standing now but sleeping.

But at least for now we are the ones with the most exuberance, so we can drink wine and tell stories and say how the world is going to be because we are going to make it like that. And we can talk about our parents, and how we are wiser because we have the exuberance and exuberance is a fuel that can power anything.

So we watch our parents hobble down the icy hill to their car, trying not to slip, and we see their gray hair and their hunched backs and their shrunk frames and we know they are out of exuberance and running on experience, which is a fuel that runs far but not fast, and then eventually not even far.

We talk about all this and Ave says how those are the true moments, the honest moments, and how everything else is just chatter — deadlines and distractions to keep us jacked up on exuberance and leaping down the road. In perverse charity, we do all we can to save each other from the impossible heartbreak moments when you briefly get a glimpse of how things really are.