There is an old Pawnee notion that when you are in your thirties and forties you are “on top.” The idea is that at this age you can view grandly, in the fullness of your strength, both the uphill struggle of youth and the downhill slide of age. I suggest that this metaphor is inaccurate. If there is such a place as “on top”—if there is a sensation of riding a life span’s crest—it does not last ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the crest is so small that I, for one, missed it altogether.
