WELCOME TO

MIDDLEHOOD
BY JUDI KETTELER between eavesdropping on the grown-up
conversations and FaceTiming with her
friends in my old bedroom while eating
her Finke’s chips.
Mom has outlived just about everyone in
her circle. My dad. Nearly all of her in-laws.
Several of her friends. It’s occurred to me
lately that I should be paying more attention
to this feat and mining her longevity secrets.
“So, Mom, let’s talk more about how
you’ve lived to be 86,” I ask, rummaging
around in her kitchen for a pencil. I find
one in the magnetic memo pad holder
that’s been a fixture on the fridge forever.
It’s dull white with little green flowers and
a dried-up eraser. “Wait a minute, I re-
member buying this pencil at Card Station
at Tower Hill Plaza when I was, like, 11.”
“Well,” Mom says, with her charac-
teristic head tilt, “it’s still a good pencil.”
“Add it to the list: Take care of your things,”
my sister, Laura, quips.
In fact, more than one artifact from my
childhood peeks out. I spot the plastic yel-
low colander in the drain board, the same
one I remember from when I was a kid. It
has a hole in the corner from when it must
have caught the edge of a burner before
someone poured boiling pasta into it. I re-
member that you always had to pour the
pasta a little askew so it didn’t fall through
the hole. Mom could have bought a new

How to Live
one long ago. But this one still works well
enough, she says, so why throw it away?
As a middle-class white woman from
a family with no significant history of

to Be 86
the diseases that tend to claim lives early,
Mom has plenty of advantages in the lon-
gevity game. She’s made good choices, too,
like eating healthy, taking walks, quitting
smoking back in the 1970s, and staying
social through friends and volunteering.
SEARCHING FOR WISDOM WHILE NAVIGATING “And water,” says my sister, Nancy. “Make

BETWEEN TWO VERY DIFFERENT GENERATIONS.

sure you put the thing about water on the
list.” The joke is that a glass of water was
always Mom’s go-to first aid.
AT MY MOM’S HOUSE ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, I WORK ON MY LIST. IT’S CALLED “HOW TO We laugh as I start jotting down notes.
live to be 86.” My two sisters are there, as always, because we spend almost every Sunday And though I agree about the water—my
afternoon at her house—a ritual we’ve kept for 10 years. kids have bruised knees but are well hydrat-
We talk about politics, history, jobs, husbands, everything. When we started, our dad ed—I’m not actually after a prescriptive list.
was still alive but declining, and it seemed important to spend as much time together as I’m searching for something less tangible.
possible. My kids were 1 and 3, and I remember those Sundays as very difficult, because On one hand, Mom hasn’t strayed far
Dad was cranky and my kids were wild and I felt exhausted all the time. from her Depression-era upbringing that
It’s so different now. It’s just the adults, though my daughter, now 10, will often tag said Make do with what you have. But she’s
along. She comes mostly for the pit stop at Finke’s, the little market full of snacks and managed to balance those formative influ-
fountain drinks just down the street from Mom’s house in Ft. Wright. She alternates ences with the idea that you have to stay

2 8 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 ILLUSTR ATIO N BY D O L A SU N
WELCOME TO MIDDLEHOOD
current and not be seduced by the notion
that your generation was the only one that
knew anything.
Sure, she holds on to old pencils, but she
has an ever-rotating stack of library books
on topics ranging from voting rights to reli-
gious conflicts. We trade book recommen-
dations and read many of the same novels.
She was the first person I knew who listened
to NPR, and her radio is still permanently
tuned to WVXU. Her coffee table holds the
I SEE HOW PEOPLE GET OLDER WITHOUT GETTING ANY
WISER. I WANT TO LIVE A LONG LIFE, BUT NOT A STALE ONE.
I WANT MORE THAN YEARS. I WANT WISDOM.
daily paper every day. She may not want to
read it digitally, but she’s not fighting the
modern world. She’s eager to participate in
conversations about culture and politics, not
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to pontificate but to learn.
That ability to balance the essential
part of you with the ability to evolve how
you think is what I want to capture on my
list. How do you do that over a lifetime?
AT MOM’S HOUSE ON SUNDAYS, I’M THE
youngest of my generation. I’m the baby
of the family, at the tail end of seven kids.
But on Tuesday nights, at our neigh-
borhood book club and equity action
group, I’m often the oldest person. I
didn’t expect this when I joined with
some neighbors a little over a year ago to
read books and have honest conversations
about racism, ableism, sexism, LGBTQ is-
sues, and other equity topics. I didn’t even
notice the age gap in the first few meet-
ings—we were meeting via Zoom, after
all. It wasn’t until we were able to start
gathering in person that I looked around
one night and thought, Oh, this is new. I
might be the oldest one here.
I think about my age a lot, but not be-
cause I’m worried about wrinkles or hold-
ing on to youth. I’m trying to make it to 86,
remember? No, I think about it because I’m
always trying to figure out how I fit in. I’m a
bit of a generational outlier, raised by Silent
Generation parents who had mostly baby
boomer children and then, in 1974, Genera-
tion X me. I waited until my mid-thirties to
have kids, which means I’m one of the older
parents. I have a mother who remembers
when FDR was president and a daughter who
will vote in her first presidential election al-
most 100 years after FDR was first elected.
So in this group of mostly (but not all)
millennials I’m hyperaware that our cul-
PH OTO G R A PH BY J O N ATH A N W I LLI S
 tural markers aren’t the same. It’s not just
that I remember using a typewriter to do
papers in college; I also remember when
Cincinnati was not a gay-friendly city at
all. I grew up with messages about color-
blindness I thought were good until only a
decade ago. I’d already voted in six presi-
dential elections before I understood that
gender identity wasn’t a fixed thing. And
concepts like sexual consent have mark-
edly evolved since I was a teenager.
As months have gone on and we’ve read
books and had great discussions in person
and over social media, I realize how much
I don’t know. How I thought I was one of
the progressive ones. But you don’t get to
keep that identity if you don’t continue to
progress. I see how the presence of young-
er people with unfamiliar ideas can throw
a person and trigger their fragility in all
kinds of ways. And how it’s tempting to
lash out at the younger generations. Call
them a bunch of snowflakes. Retreat into
the idea that your generation had it right
PH OTO G R A PH BY J O N ATH A N W I LLI S
or at least deserves a break.
I see how people get older without get-
ting any wiser. I want to live a long life, but
not a stale one. Not one where I think my
cultural and historical markers are truer or
earn me anything. I want more than years.
I want wisdom.
So I go back, month after month, to
our Tuesday meetings. I don’t compare
my Gen X sensibilities to their millennial
ones so much any more. Those divisions
aren’t helpful or particularly interesting.
We’re all just learners.
THE OTHER DAY, MOM AND I WERE TALK-
ing about someone we both know from her
social circle who’s a little younger than
Mom but seems to have suddenly aged
beyond her years. “She doesn’t have what
I have, with you girls coming every Sun-
day,” Mom said. It’s not just as simple as
the cliché that we keep our mom young;
it’s that our presence forces her into ac-
tion. “You know I clean up the house every
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M 3 1
Sunday when you’re coming,” she says. “I
don’t want you to think I’m some old lady
who can’t manage.”
I laugh, because that’s so Mom. No one
would ever mistake her for someone who
couldn’t manage.
But there’s a gem in there. Something
that definitely needs to be on my list. One
of the best things my mom has taught me
is to just keep showing up for people. You
show up for you and you show up for them,
and it creates a beautiful blend of mutual
wisdom and accountability.
Gen X is so angsty, but I’ve realized how
lucky I am to inhabit this particular gen-
erational sandwich. I think about the book
we just read in my group, Redefining Real-
ness, by Janet Mock; it’s her story of being
a Black Hawaiian transgender woman who
grew up in poverty. I did the newfangled
thing all the kids are raving about and got
the audio book. I listened while running.
It was so good, the miles dropped away. I
can’t wait to recommend it to my mom.