It only seemed like yesterday that every weekend a group carpooled and drove to some flyblown town in the far left-hand corner of Victoria to celebrate someone’s 21st. We’d drink terrible booze that would set your teeth on edge, eat a dry sandwich, make appalling speeches, sleep on the floor in the parents’ lounge room and then drive back to the city on Sunday, with an obligatory stop at a highway McDonald’s.
Now I’m experiencing a season of 40ths. Everyone, of course, has more money, although people always say they feel poorer. There are oysters and good mid-priced sparkling wine. There are real glasses – not plastic, and there are hotel rooms. The days of sleeping on the floor are over.
But, but … a 40th can throw you down some existential sinkhole, the faultline you didn’t even know you had. You leave the party not with a hangover, but anxiety and confusion.
I’ve attended three in the last couple of weeks. Here are my dispatches from the frontline of midlife.
Melbourne
At the party there are people I went to college with who I haven’t seen since 1994.
When I meet them they look different – as in they don’t look 18, they look 40. Having not seen them in 22 years, I have not had time to adjust incrementally to their ageing process. Seeing them is incredibly and immediately shocking. Who are these OLD PEOPLE? I pull a friend aside. “What happened to Marcus? He’s got GREY HAIR!”
“Marcus is 40.”
“But, but – when I saw him last he looked completely different. It’s like seeing Marcus’s dad!”
“They are no doubt saying the same thing about you.”
“Hmhhf! I don’t look like Marcus’s dad.”
I reach for conversation topics but they are also frozen in time, from when I last saw them in 1994. The Pearl Jam concert we saw, the copies of Infinite Jest in everyone’s room that no one read, the strange things that kept us occupied all day: studying torts law or economic history or botany. And the passion for our extracurricular activities: ping-pong, hockey, debating, the theatre. Last time I saw this crowd we staged an incredibly weird, amateur production of Shakespeare’s worst play, Measure for Measure.
“So, Marcus, are you still in the theatre?”
Marcus looks confused.
I prompt him, “Provost? Measure for Measure?”
“Er, no. I’m a constitutional lawyer with three children.”
But later in the night we talk about politics and that leads to Marxism – which then leads us right back to conversations we had in 1994. Thank God for Marx!
“Marcus may have grey hair but he’s still the same. He’s still a Marxist!” I tell my friend later.
Why do I need to be reassured that he hasn’t changed? It’s my own fear of ageing that’s doing it, I’m sure. If we’re all still sitting in the quad, listening to Pearl Jam and pretending to read Infinite Jest, then we’ll never die. We can just sit in this patch of sun forever.
Blue Mountains
It’s Saturday and the 40th of my best friend, Patrick. Well, one of my best friends – but he’s definitely in the top five.
Patrick’s main concern is that we all have enough to drink.
“There’s two bottles of champagne for every guest! We have to drink it all! I don’t want to carry it down the mountain.”
If a guest departs for the afternoon train, a bottle is thrust into his or her hands with the instruction: “Drink it on the train!”
At this party there is a string quartet, an opera singer and a couple of speeches.
I guess I’ll do a speech, I think to myself, since I’m his best friend.
“You can do a speech later, at the pub,” Patrick tells me.
“Oh, all right, I suppose.”
But I want to speak at the lunch, after all, I am his best friend, and also people will get too drunk to remember it if I speak at the pub. It’s barely dessert and some people can hardly stand. They’re arguing about the carbon tax and Trump, they’re confessing to ancient grudges and crushes and walking around the gardens in the rain, barefoot or in stockings, holding full bottles of champagne to drink on the train.
I start making notes for my speech. But here and there around the party, I hear alarming things – other people describing themselves as “Patrick’s best friend”.
I also overhear Patrick introducing at least two different people as his “best friend”.
How many best friends does this guy have?
Is it possible that I’m not the only one? That can’t be possible, can it?
I understand now why some people never mix their friends. It’s because in each group they are harbouring a best friend – maybe even two – and if all the best friends were to meet, then there would be some sort of seismic eruption – that sinkhole opening up again, like the discovery perhaps of seven planets, just like us, orbiting nearby.
Sydney
With newer friends, it’s not the discovery that they have grey hair or multiple best friends that’s a shock, it’s that they have parents. Or they went to primary school. In short, they were once young. When you meet people in their late 30s, they are pretty much fully formed and a part of you assumes they were always this way.
So at the birthday party of my friend and editor Gabs, when I was introduced to her mother, my first reaction was, “What, you have a mother?”
