I’m wearing my magic ring of middle-aged invisibility, a dog-faced old burgher like Bilbo Baggins, only taller (p 82).
“What?” Says the barista. The middle-aged are so boring (p 59).
Now he is the melancholy middle-aged guy copping a look, and as she scootches up onto the aisle seat, tucking one knee under her, Kevin drapes his jacket over his clasped hands and rolls his eyes upward, an altar book contemplating a prank (p 13).
This was the apotheosis of cool for him, and it still is, even now, as he trudges middle-aged down the concourse in Austin past the food court (p 19).
His middle-aged bladder at last more or less empty, he shakes, tucks, and zips up (p 16).
He wades through the heat toward the wide bank of door, where a middle-aged guy in a billowy shirt and a gaudy tie, his slacks cinched under his paunch, dangles a Diet Coke by four fingers of one hand and lifts a smoke mechanically with the other (p 47).
Then he sits up a little straighter in the chair because he’s got nothing to be sorry for, goddammit, it’s not his fault that sorrow overwhelms him, that’s just middle-age, buddy, everybody regrets something ( p 63).
God help me, thought Kevin, my younger ex-girlfriend is middle-aged (p106).
Say he tells her that it’s because she walks like a girl he slept with for three months back in the eighties – Christ, that’s even more ridiculous than simple middle-aged lust (p 70).
Without thinking, he’s picked up a section of the Wall Street Journal, and his leathering middle-aged pupils laboriously refocus on the close-ranked print, his heart racing at the sight of Joy Luck, at the memory of Lynda, at the mild thrill of his own shamelessness (p 77).
See MIDDLE-AGED MAN (p 41).
