Narrow streets of Shadyside

On the narrow streets of Shadyside, young college students walked their hopes from innocence to experience. Their minds, fresh from the burst of promise that settled on the shoulders of their secondary educations, explored the mystery of the arts and sciences as they brushed against the walls of the brownstones, darted their heads under  low-hanging trees dotting the sidewalks, and tiptoed the minefield of high expectations. As they crossed the firm-footed bridge into their twenties, they unknowingly entered the decade of unlimited possibilities, blissfully unaware that other decades lurked beyond.

In ten years, they quietly and begrudgingly entered the decade of their thirties, when unlimited possibilities morphed into bullet items, laundry lists, and artifacts of the ego. Another ten years beyond that, they unconvincingly professed happiness and satisfaction with the products of their thirties and all that much more promised of them in their forties. But the forties, unlike the twenties and thirties, only taught them that what they had learned paled feebly by comparison with what remained to be learned. And in those ten years, they realized, quite suddenly and without warning, that the years left to them were most probably fewer than those behind them. And fifty knocked their egos onto the floor where they belonged anyway. For in those next ten years, with anxiety and barely suppressed fear they ruthlessly scrambled to plan their golden years in the sun and in the shade. But with the fifties came the understanding that life promised us nothing, life guaranteed us nothing, and we could not plan our futures too closely. That led to the sixties, when all the hopes, promises, expectations, and plans yielded to reality, and they abandoned their futile dreams in murky acceptance of the realities behind them and the realities in front of them.

For those lucky enough in this crazy world to reach seventy, all of life's warts, blemishes, wrinkles, and lines took on a meaning of beauty and luminence, for they broadcast to the world a life well spent. And for those lucky enough to reach eighty, the next ten years held a blissful zen-like appreciation of each day as it arrived and as it departed. And for the few who made ninety, the process of saying goodbye and embracing the next world became a statement of graceful simplicity. And the very few who reached one hundred told their proteges that the whole thing was one big colossal joke.