Well Opie, I guess I'm gettin' old

When do we know we are getting old?
(Of course, all of us are getting older every day we’re fortunate enough to wake up and greet the world. What I’m talking about is that moment when time catches up with us.)
Is it something our knees tell us? Or our hips? Or our backs?
Does it come — as a good friend told me — when our children rue their 40th birthday?
Or does it happen in those moments with younger friends and colleagues when we lose the frame of reference?
You know what I’m talking about.
You’ll be having a perfectly normal conversation with some folks who just happen to be maybe 30 years younger than you are, then you’ll say something that baffles them.
Trouble is, your audience is so young they have no idea what you are talking about. There is no shared frame of reference.
(I would mention at this point that there was an excellent article on this topic a few months ago in The New Yorker. But then I would have to explain to younger readers that The New Yorker is a magazine. And then I would have to explain to still younger readers what the heck a magazine is. You get the picture.)
Consider, for instance, a newsroom conversation about a week ago.
I had been filling people in about a murder in Jay County decades ago. The investigation, I said, was a “real Barney Fife job.”
And one of the people I was talking to stopped.
“Who is Barney Fife?” he said.
And suddenly I felt a million years old. Or maybe 2.5 million like those fossilized bones they recently found in South Africa.
Who is Barney Fife? Why, everyone knows who Barney Fife was. Didn’t you watch the Andy Griffith Show?
“Never saw it,” he said.
By now, I not only felt old; I felt as if I were on another planet.
So then I was faced with a challenge. I not only had to explain who Barney Fife was and that he was a fictional deputy sheriff on the Andy Griffith Show, I also had to explain who Andy Griffith was. (Matlock had a deputy? I could hear them asking.) I thought there might be a connection by pointing out  that Ron Howard played Andy’s son Opie and that Ron had starred in “American Graffiti” and was on “Happy Days.” Then I remembered that “American Graffiti” hit the big screen in the 1970s — 40 years ago — and that “Happy Days” would have only been encountered on Nick at Night.
The frame of reference was gone, or at least it was vanishing like a summer tan.
The durable ones last. Kids still know that “Psycho” was scary, that the Beatles will always be cool and that “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an important book.
But if you start digging a little deeper with your references — lyrics to Stones’ songs, references to obscurities like Roger Miller’s “England Swings” or dialogue from movies they’ve never seen (“It’s Chinatown, Jake”) — you have lost them entirely.
And that, my friends, is when you know you are getting old.
The truth is, it started before that. But you were just too busy to notice.