Noon in Paris now and I’m sitting here watching the man in the corner while I think about David Foster Wallace’s fish. And I’m wondering: Should I bite the bullet and date an old guy? 

The fish I mean is the one who says: “What the hell is water?” 

Wallace’s fish lacks perspective – never having experienced anything other than water, the fish cannot identify water. What the fish needs is an amphibian. Watching a turtle climb out of the water and go, presumably, elsewhere, it will realize there must be something other than water. And if there’s something else – land– then water must be, well… something: Water. 

And as for me– I need an octogenarian. To solve the problem of my youthful myopia. I, not unlike the fish, am submerged in water. I like to imagine it’s the water in the pool at a fabulous pool party. But maybe it’s more like Carnegie lake. My peers and I, we’re all swimming in this shit. The waters of youth. Abundant stamina and a hearty preoccupation with our fellow swimmers dissuades us from getting out and drying off. Maybe we’ll miss something. Young people are fast, move fast, so fast that the pace of our forefathers — and actual fathers — seems slow and boring. So we stay in the pool. Especially in college. Caring about what we care about and totally forgetting that we care about this stuff because we’re submerged in something that, eventually, will pass: Youth. 

Staying in the water, we forget that we’re prone to prune. Remember when you were little, and your parents lured you into the bath with Lush bubble bath clay or with gummy vitamins or by saying get in the fucking bath, and once you were in you’d have liked to stay in, but eventually your dad was like, okay, get the fuck out now, you’re pruney. And when you were five, wrinkly finger pads freaked you out. But now that you’ve been around the block (two decades) and have tried drugs, pruney fingers are like mitochondria: You remember the term and definition but beyond that, you don’t care. So you stay in the pool and talk shit and feel absolutely overwhelmed by the things that feel absolutely overwhelming when one is young. 

But see if I dated this man (or you did) sitting in the corner of this cafe on Rue de Turennes – I’d (we’d) have a permanent tether. To perspective. I stare at him in wont style. Monsieur looks suave in a distinctly French, distinctly aged way. He sips an espresso over his newspaper. Whatever commands his brain is sending to his hand to lift the cup or to his lips to sip it are perfectly imperceptible, like those electric cars that move silently. I count him sip from the tiny cup eight times. How he makes it last, I have no idea. It’s probably been a long time since he’s taken a shot. Out of practice with the let-me-get-this-into-my-blood-stream as fast as possible approach. I look down at my lap. A sea of crumbs sprawls across my eleventh-day-wear-jeans. This tartine au beurre et confiture is delicious but I am messy and I lose bits to gravity, furthermore I don’t read the newspaper, I’m unsophisticated and I wish for milk– plant mylk – to lighten this espresso which tastes like ashtray.

So you can imagine why it appeals– as this man’s Mrs., or even just his casual Miss, I’d be tethered. To life outside this cesspool of youthful inundation. Pleased with myself and at the prospect, I keep going: opening my eyes at 10am, seeing him lying next to me in bed. I poke him. His body is ten degrees colder than my own because it’s been up cooling for two hours since sleep– Old people don’t sleep in. They have things to do. By the end of those two hours, by the time I re-entered the world, monsieur would already know everything important that had happened in it, since he last checked, yesterday at exactly this time. Grown people have routines and habits. And perspective. 

I daydream until the expiration date on this idea – of dating an older man – arrives. It had a shelf life of three minutes and twenty seconds. Lasted until I remembered the many other parts that would come with such a romantic involvement. And if I said I was keen on those other parts, I’d be lying. 

Then my dad calls me. The same one who cutoff my bath when I was a five year old pruned shrimp. Hey, I say, he says. Yep, my friends just left Paris, no, I don’t know where I’ll sleep for the next week, I have too much shit with me to stay in a hostel, yes I can look for an Airbnb– what? God, I forgot she lived here. Um. Let me think.

I think. Not considering so much as basking in the glory of the moment, when it’s all still a nascent possibility. This is my chance. 

Yes, dad, what a great idea. I would love to stay on the couch of your mother’s best friend who lives in the seventh arrondissement with her tabby cat Moteque and a shrine of her husband and– Or wait. I don’t know those parts yet. I guess all I actually say is: Sure. Ask. 

So my dad phones his fancy mother’s Tel Aviv apartment and asks if she thinks her also fancy friend Odette might like to have a runty twenty year old with eleventh-day-wear-unwashed-pants sleeping in her one bedroom apartment for a week. I hope the silence I imagine on the other end doesn’t last as long as it does in my head.

By some miracle, or I guess just selfless hospitality – another trait I have to glean from a wise olderfolk – three hours later, I’m standing outside Odette’s door. It takes her a minute to answer it. This makes me smile. Smugly, I remember the man I considered spending the rest of my life with for a total of three minutes and twenty seconds, three hours ago. A spring chicken, compared to the person on the other side of this door. I hear her coming and feel glad that I paper toweled my armpits in that cafe bathroom. 

Bonjour, enchantée, merci, enchantée!! In a giddy fit, my knowledge of the French language shrinks down to the arsenal I held as a student in Madame Dupuy’s sixth grade class. I’m flustered. She is so old. 

(I feel permission to say this because a) she is literally NINETY YEARS OLD and I imagine the fact of one’s years-on-earth becomes a feat rather than a source of shame by that age and also b) she doesn’t speak English nor have a computer (won’t read this). Am I fetishing geriarchs, maybe, but old people have squeezed my cheeks my whole life, so now it’s my turn.)

Factual elements of my week with Odette: (bliss, in short.) We shared a half-bottle of champagne every single night at dinner. Also every single night at dinner, we ate a chunk of the finest smoked salmon from her freezer that she would defrost anywhere between three hours and half an hour before dinner, so while our appetizer did not change from night to night, the consistency and temperature of the saumon could never be predicted. To accompany it, we had packaged Carrefour brioche rolls, plus baba ganoush, hummus, and tzatziki. For our main course we ate petit circular steaks wrapped in a thick strip of white beef fat, pan seared in her pan for ¼ of the time it would take to actually cook the steak. Of course I snuck mine into the microwave when she wasn’t looking, but then I ate my steak with as much delight as I would normally have terror at the idea of a round steak wrapped in beef fat. But because it was Odette who (sort of) cooked it for me, and because the soundtrack to my cow mastication was stories of Bucharest and Haifa and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the forties, I ate the whole thing up, both literally and figuratively. 

During the day I mostly fucked off, exploring the city and drawing pictures of anthropomorphized animals in my notebook and reading Annie Ernaux and trying on clothes made of velvet and staring at strangers. One day Odette’s neighbor and best friend, Jacques, a young lad of just seventy-five, drove us in his Peugot around the city, the two of them pointing out the cafes in which they spent their youth – not Deux Magots nor Cafe de Flor, shockingly– and also monuments related to historic events I pretended to have heard of. At home Odette showed me photos, hundreds of them, most of them three times, all covered in dust, and I felt the rhythm of my breath be something it never is, something it can only be when not even one ounce of you is planning what to say or do or react with next. 

Odette was not curious about me nor my life and did not ask me questions, just called me mignon and ma petite and made me eat food and dress in layers and let me listen to her talk and look at photos of her with other people who are mostly dead now. For a whole week, I was but a passive subject, a receiving vessel of insight and stories and nonagenarian ramblings. Even when I was out of the apartment during the day, I remained in the mode of chez Odette. I felt young, even younger than usual, actually, but in a curious-open-questioning way more than a preoccupied-with-young-person-shit way. If that makes sense. 

When it was time to leave Odette’s, she called me once more mignon, gave me twenty euros for a cab – seriously, she thought I was eleven – and sent me on my way. I was definitely sadder to go than she was to see me go, though I’d be surrounded by a pack of friends in another country later that evening, and she’d be right where she was, just sans me. But I guess when you’re old, you don’t really mind. 

And so I spent the next few days loitering in Madrid wine bars and idling through Krakow Christmas markets, with the friends, the young ones, not thinking of Odette so much because I’m out-of-sight-out-of-mind, but I think my heart rate stayed low. 

Fast forward. One week later. 

I’ve pulled it off again. Here I am, in a tiny airbnb along the river in Oxford. I look out at the same view Lewis Caroll looked at. I smile holding my cup of tea. Two days into staying with Bianca, and I can already feel the magic. The comfort, stability, peacefulness of it all. I inhale the smell of peppermint, and exhale slowly– cosplaying old. I had never done an airbnb experience before. Here, the experience is Bianca. She is — *blushes* —   seventy-ish. I get to sit with her in the mornings and watch her cook me porridge and not help and hear her tales and the best part is, I can feel the wisdom seeping into me even though we wake up in separate beds. I remember monsieur and his espresso, whom and which I’d forgotten. Fondly, but, again, no longer needing him, now that I have Bianca. And on the subject of Bianca I remember Odette. Two experiences totally different in nature, one I’m buying, one speaks to me in French, one is a textile designer and ultimately not that old, one makes me poultry and seafood for dinner and the other carrot cake spread with lemon curd and porridge dolloped with nutella for breakfast. The common thread, though: not my age, kind, wise, wonderful. Also both have cats. 

Ultimately I have one thing to say and it’s: find yourself some older people to hang around. Ones with whom you share no DNA or legal ties. Just show up and let them steer. It’s super, very, particularly, awesome.