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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to wrap up the show today by inviting phone calls about your intergenerational friendships. Why? There's a great short essay on Vox that celebrates intergenerational friendships, in part for their potential to widen your world and "offer us a longer view and a reminder of all the varied experiences beyond our day-to-day." The name of the essay, You should have more friends of all ages. The author of the piece Charley Locke joins me now. Charley Locke is a freelance writer who often focuses on youth and elders. Charley, welcome to WNYC.

Charley Locke: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite you in. Do you have an intergenerational friendship that you would like to tell us a little bit about? How have you cultivated and maintained it? How did it start in the first place? If you're 25, you don't wind up usually befriending some 60-year-old you meet, or it doesn't even have to be that intergenerational, but talk about your intergenerational friendship, how perhaps it surprised you, how it started, what you each get out of it. Whether you're a younger person or an older person, you are invited in. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call with your intergenerational friendship stories, or you can also text that number if you want to write it down, 212-433-9692. Let me just say before we really dive in that, yes, we are aware that there's a new movie out called May December, which is really not about this. That's not what we're asking about. Those of you who know what May December really is about, we're dealing strictly with platonic relationships.

Charley Locke: Different kind of relationships.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Charley, what got you interested in the topic of intergenerational friendships?

Charley Locke: For me, this is really an unusually personal story. I'm a freelance writer like you said. During the pandemic, I was mostly reporting about kids for The New York Times for Kids and reporting for a podcast called 70 Over 70 from Pineapple Street Media that was interviewing a lot of people over 70. During the pandemic when as a person in my late 20s, I wasn't seeing my friends, I wasn't in my normal social life, I was spending all my time talking to kids and talking to elders, and it really got me through the dark time of the pandemic. It taught me how to step away from the hamster wheel of being in the time of life where you're really setting your own life up and really take a longer view and think about the joy that you can find in everyday life, the things that really matter to you. Those friendships have really mattered to me since then. In particular, one friendship with a woman named Lucia, who's 96 now, lives in New York City, and she is a really meaningful friend to me and has really-- Those friendships, especially with Lucia, have helped me think about my life differently, and I've started to talk to more and more people about how those intergenerational friendships play an important role for them, both ones-

Brian Lehrer: What's one way that that-- [crosstalk]

Charley Locke: - like me and Lucia who are-- [crosstalk] Sorry, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: I was just going to ask what's one way that that friendship has made you think about the world differently?

Charley Locke: One really big way is just finding the delight in every day, even in the pandemic when the things that normally structured my life weren't around anymore. Thinking about the moments of soaking in the sunshine from your patio and noticing what birds are migrating through where you live in a different way or going on a walk and people watching and delighting in the world around you. Really, remembering where you are and the things that are not just in the time of life that you really are moving through.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear somebody's story. [unintelligible 00:04:20] in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, [unintelligible 00:04:23].

Speaker 1: Hi. Oh my gosh. [laughs] I didn't expect to be the first caller. Thank you so much. I'm 53, and I've known my friend Will, who is 86, since I was in my mid-20s. He was my friend Elaine's-- He rented rooms in his house to younger people. He always rented at a really, really low rate because he wanted to give people a chance to get ahead in life. My friend Elaine was in grad school and working part-time when she was living there.

Then, when she moved out to New York, I moved in, and this was in San Francisco, and I lived there for a few years. He's always bragging about how many people have gotten graduate degrees and law degrees from living in that house. At one point when he had to sell his house, he was like like, "Oh my God, I have to sell my house." I said, "Just raise our rent." He just thought that was incredible that I would say that. The thing about him, he's 86. I still see him when I visit San Francisco. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island. Born in the '30s. I've learned so much from him, especially about American movies, about how to live life in a different vein.

He has two adult kids, but he's lived alone most of his life. He's lived such a rich life, lived in Europe for months at a time. I just realized most of my friends and family live a very-- Sorry. You were saying?

Brian Lehrer: You learned there are many ways to live through him.

Speaker 1: Yes, many ways to-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:06:10], I'm going to leave it there.

Speaker 1: I think it's funny--

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for starting us off. I'm going to go on to the next caller so we can get a decent number of people in here. That was wonderful. Donna in the city, you're on WNYC. Hi, Donna.

Donna: Hi there. I'm 82, and I made some friends at the Gay Community Center grief group. One was a mother with a 12-year-old boy. While we were talking after the group, I teased her and said, "Oh, I need to adopt a 12-year-old boy because I need help with my electrical devices, my phone, my computer, everything." We laughed, but we made friends. It's delightful. The boy is coming to spend the weekend with me. His mother is a single mother. I'm also friends with the physical therapist who took care of my partner, and we have stayed friends. I have a variety of people who are younger than me, and I look for it because I think it helps me a great deal.

Brian Lehrer: Donna, thank you.

Donna: It keeps me involved.

Brian Lehrer: Donna, thank you so much for that call. She talks about the 12-year-old helping her with stuff. There's a TV commercial, I don't even know what it's for, but it starts with the grandkids coming over to the grandparents' house and the grandparents open the door and they throw these computers and phones at the kids and say, "I don't know how any of this works." [laughs] That's the beginning of that relationship. Any thoughts about those first two calls?

Charley Locke: Yes, absolutely. Donna's call in particular, I think it's a really good reminder that the value of intergenerational friendships is not just between people who are 50 years younger and older than each other, but there's also a real value in cultivating friendships and relationships with people who are 10 or 20 or 30 years apart from you as well like Donna becoming friends with a single mom. There's a real utility and role that each of them can play in their relationship for the other. I think that's a really beautiful way to build a community of care through your friendships.

Brian Lehrer: Carolyn in Inwood has a story. Hi, Carolyn.

Carolyn: Hi, Brian. I'm 38 years old, and I've been single my whole life. I've never really dated. Recently, I've gotten to know a neighbor of mine who's in her 70s and her husband, and they met in their late 40s and got married. Getting to know them and seeing how they came together late in life and were able to build a life around each other has made me rethink my whole stance on feeling like, "Oh, it would never work. I'm too set in my ways. I don't really want to pursue a partner." Has actually made me reconsider that and open myself up to dating.

Brian Lehrer: That is so interesting and beautiful. Carolyn, thank you very much. Do you find that in your research about this, Charley, that some of these intergenerational relationships, friendships aren't just nice for what people learn, but that it actually changes their behavior toward their own lives?

Charley Locke: Yes, absolutely. I think it often does. I think it really brings those different perspectives home. One of the friendships that I talk about in the Vox article is between a woman named Victoria, who's 71 now, and a man named Devin, who's 25. They met in Philadelphia when Devin was a freshman at Drexel University. Devin really talked about how getting to know Victoria, who is a writer, really opened him up to a different kind of life, a path that is much more winding and really focusing on experiences rather than really focusing on establishing his exact life trajectory when he was 18, and so really reframing what he wants to do with his life and how he wants to spend his time.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Tell us why your article, and I realize that people don't always write the titles of their articles, so maybe you won't have an answer to this, but your article on Vox is prescriptive in the title. It says, "You should have more friends of all ages." Did you suggest that it be prescriptive like that?

Charley Locke: [chuckles] I did not, but I can speak to the energy of it, which I built the idea of the article with my editor Alana. The idea is really that a lot of people see the importance of a relationship like this but don't know how to get there. I think there's pretty widespread understanding that they could be valuable, but it's really hard to figure out where to meet people and how to build a relationship with someone who's a really different age as shown through the people who are calling in and have really, really different stories of how they met and built these relationships. It can be hard to know how to do it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get at least one more in here. How about Ella in Manhattan? You're on WNYC. Hello?

Ella: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Ella, you're on the air.

Ella: Oh, hi. This is Ella from Inwood. I'm working in Inwood Hill Park, and we're talking about how Governor Cuomo made the nursing homes take the COVID-positive patients back. I should mention, I've been working in nursing homes for 35 years, and my companion said, "Oh, well, those nursing home patients, they had one foot in the grave anyway." I was really shocked because nobody has the right to make that kind of value judgment about anybody's life. I decided I'm writing a book about all the wonderfulness that I've encountered in nursing homes over the years, the people I've met, and the lessons I've learned, what I've observed. There was one in particular, one resident who was there 18 years and he thrived, and we were very, very close. We were so close. We talked to each other on the phone when the ball was dropping on New Year's Eve. He's a founding member of my award-winning program called The Musical Caravan, peers ministering to peers. When he died, I spoke at his funeral and I told his gathered family about his life and how he was president of the resident council, and he threw himself a big birthday party every year, and he was king of the prom, and we dressed for Halloween and had a girlfriend.

When I finished, everybody applauded, and then two grand nephews came up and they turned to the coffin and they said, "Uncle, we're sorry we didn't visit you in the nursing home because now we realize that we really missed something."

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Great story, Ella. That is going to be the last story as we're out of time with Charley Locke. You can find her essay, You should have more friends of all ages, on vox.com. Charley, just say in 10 seconds if you can, are there ways of going about finding friends of different ages?

Charley Locke: Yes, absolutely. I think one really good way to do it is to start volunteering, and more broadly, to join organizations or groups, whether that's a community group or a group at your local library, groups that are really open to people who share interests of all different ages.

Brian Lehrer: Charley, this is great and heartwarming. So many great stories from our listeners that you inspired. Thanks for coming on with us.

Charley Locke: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by MaryEileen Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our Daily Politics podcast, and we had Milton Ruiz and Juliana Fonda at the audio controls.

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