The Sandwich Test

Late in my sixty-fourth year, I had a dream about getting old.

Not dying. Not disease. Not falling down the stairs and being discovered three days later by a concerned Amazon driver. The dream was about something that frightens me more: remaining perfectly alive while becoming increasingly incompatible with the world.

I was still a college writing professor, but the college had metastasized into an enormous city. I had offices scattered across campus, although “office” was a generous term. Some of my offices were hidden inside caves. Others were buried beneath rocks. Apparently, I had been teaching composition continuously through the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic eras.

I was no longer Professor McMahon.

I was Ancient Man.

Students and faculty tolerated me with the peculiar tenderness people reserve for very old dogs and malfunctioning appliances they don’t quite have the heart to throw away. I was still technically employed. I still had classes to teach. I simply never made it to them.

I was too busy looking for lunch.

Eventually I wandered into a campus café and ordered a sandwich. Then came the moment that crystallized the entire dream.

I didn’t know how to pay.

Everyone else apparently understood the electronic payment system. There were screens, phones, apps, codes, invisible financial transmissions humming through the atmosphere. I stood before the cashier with the helpless expression of a Cro-Magnon man encountering an Apple Store.

Finally, I opened my wallet.

Inside, instead of dollar bills, was a wad of turkey cold cuts.

This was my money.

I handed the cashier several slices.

She stared at them.

Then she stared at me.

For a moment, I could see her weighing her options: call security, summon a social worker, or simply accept that the ancient professor had reached the stage of life when deli meat constituted legal tender.

She chose mercy.

Suppressing her laughter, she accepted my turkey and made me a sandwich while her coworkers turned away so I wouldn’t see them shaking.

This was The Sandwich Test: the moment when an ordinary transaction reveals that the world has quietly changed its operating system without consulting you.

Every generation eventually takes it.

One day you are a fully competent adult who understands how civilization works. Then you encounter a parking meter, QR code, authentication app, digital wallet, restaurant kiosk, or some other technological improvement designed to make life “easier,” and discover that apparently everyone received instructions except you.

The young person behind the counter looks at you sympathetically.

You reach for your wallet.

Turkey.

The humiliation goes deeper than technological incompetence. The Sandwich Test tells you that your currency—literal and metaphorical—is losing value.

I had survived chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, online teaching, Canvas, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. This longevity gave me a certain prestige. People regarded me as one might regard a giant sequoia: ancient, impressive, and probably best left exactly where he is.

At one point I encountered Florida A&M’s magnificent Marching 100 moving across campus. I followed them.

Their music filled me with heavenly bliss. I wasn’t supposed to interfere with their rehearsal, but nobody threw me out. Ancient Man had privileges. If an elderly professor who had apparently been teaching since the Paleozoic wanted to trail behind the marching band, you let him.

This was the contradiction of old age. I was ridiculous but venerable, obsolete but durable, invisible but somehow legendary. People humored me precisely because I had survived long enough to become an artifact.

Yet I didn’t feel honored.

I felt lonely.

I thought of the larval souls of Hades, those spectral inhabitants of the underworld who retained consciousness without fully participating in life. That was the real terror of the dream: not that my body had failed but that the world had moved several feet away from me. I could still see it, hear it, walk through it.

I just couldn’t quite enter it.

Then I woke up.

My muscles were sore from the previous day’s kettlebell workout. I lay there contemplating Ancient Man, wandering through geological time with his useless wallet stuffed with lunch meat.

Then I got out of bed and headed for the exercise bike.

The larval state could wait another day.