I went to another rally last Saturday, just like I have for sixty years, and it was the same old route — starting at the library and ending up at the plaza where the statue used to be, but it’s still called the plaza anyway — and I saw all the signs and heard all the chants and felt the same old surge of something like defiance, something like belonging, but there was a shift this time, something fundamental in the air, a sort of cognitive dissonance because the faces… well, they were different. It started a few years ago, a trickle, but now it’s a flood, and I stood there, 76 years old and feeling every single one of them, looking for familiar wrinkles, a knowing glance, the kind of camaraderie that only comes from decades of shared pavement and shared hope, but they weren't there and the people who were there, the young people, they were passionate, yes, and their signs were creative, and their voices were strong, but their faces were… blank, to me, and not just in the way that youth always looks a little blank to age, but in a way that suggested a different kind of memory, a different kind of history, and I felt a pang, a deep ache right in my chest, a sort of pre-grief for something that wasn’t quite gone but was certainly fading. And I remember when my first marriage ended, when I was 48, and friends I’d known since college just sort of… evaporated, one by one, deciding they couldn’t be friends with both of us, or maybe just deciding it was too much effort, too much mess, and I had to build a whole new life, brick by painful brick, finding new people, new routines, new reasons to get up in the morning, and it feels a little like that now, like I’m standing on the precipice of another rebuild, but this time it’s not just a new social circle, it’s a whole new world, a whole new generation, and I’m not sure I have the energy for it anymore. One young woman, she must have been 20, 22 perhaps, had a sign that read “SYSTEMIC CHANGE NOW” and her eyes, they were so bright, so full of conviction, and I wanted to tell her, “Honey, we’ve been saying that since before you were born,” but the words caught in my throat, and what good would it do anyway, and I just nodded instead, a sort of ancient, weary acknowledgment, and she smiled back, a polite, distant smile, and I knew then that we weren’t speaking the same language, not really, not where it counted, not in the deep, resonant way that the old guard used to speak to each other, a glance across a crowded street, a shared sigh, a shorthand of shared battles and shared losses. And I walked home feeling like a relic, a piece of living history that no one quite knew what to do with anymore, and I thought about all the other rallies, all the other causes, all the other faces, and the sheer volume of time that had passed, the erosion of familiar landscapes, both physical and emotional, and I made myself a cup of tea, and stared out the window at the familiar oak tree, and thought about how even that tree, sturdy as it looks, is slowly, imperceptibly, changing, day by day, year by year, and I suppose that’s just how it goes, for all of us, and for everything else too.