Top row, from left: Ruth Anne Bloom, retired; Soon Hea Oh, housewife; Peggy De Santo, retired. Bottom row, from left: Patsy Tarr, philanthropist; Kathleen Johnson, librarian; Deborah Willis, artist and academic.    (Photo: Martin Schoeller. Grooming by Jane Choi for La Mer (Bloom, Willis, Tarr); Elisa Flowers Using Dior Beauty (Oh); Susan Donoghue for Bobbi Brown (Hall).)

Once I derided Wisdom as nothing but the gummy verbiage Polonius tried to lay on the head of Laertes. Now I despair over what thoughts of value I might be able to impart to my own children. After all, our house is very different from the one in which I grew up. We never shut up, and the separation between us has never been especially well delineated. Even though each of the kids would eventually get his or her own room, we could often be found piled on top of each other like a litter of cats. We continue to listen to a lot of the same music, even the new stuff, and talk more with each other in a single night than I did with my parents in a month. Once we took a trip around the world, staying in crappy hippie hotels all the way; I wrote a book about it, alternating chapters with my eldest daughter, who described the entire country of India as a living hell. Most people thought her sections, written at age 17, were better than mine. There was a kind of haphazard democracy to us, a vague division of labor and authority that we generally took for granted.

I never thought much about this structure, loose as it was, until quite recently, around the time my then-26-year-old youngest daughter, after four years of college in Indiana, a job in Philly, and a stint in Bed-Stuy, moved back into our house. For me, such a move would have been akin to placing a gun to my head, but that was then and now is now. When I was 26, living on St. Marks Place, the rent was $168 a month. The same apartment now probably goes for $168 a square foot. With the job market slow for experts in the hermeneutics of Michel Foucault, slack must be cut. It seemed a boon, getting extra time with die Kinder.Still, with my 23-year-old son already in residence, that made the better part of a hat trick.

The arrangement was less than smooth. Things like waking up in the morning to find those familiar dirty dishes in the sink were particularly vexing. It was no problem for me to slip into the dismaying role of the ticked-off, hectoring dad. According to any system of “stages,” wasn’t all that supposed to be over long ago?

Eventually, we worked much of it out because we realized that we were both in motion, me to oldness, she to wherever she was going. We engaged in several encounters concerning our transitioning Weltanschauungs. Instead of grumping about how everything is derivative, my daughter said, I should examine modernity as a series of Venn diagrams, ever-shifting spheres, floating balloons of self-defining identities, separate yet fungible. What was necessary was to look for those areas of coincidence, where the circles overlap. It was in those zones that we could make common cause. It was probably a rap she learned sitting around in some crusty punk squat, but in a world where those ubiquitous screens are actually NSA panopticons, it sounded good. So we sat down and watched six straight episodes of The X-Files.

One conversation during this period stands out. It was a few months after she’d moved back, right before I turned 65. I’d just pitched a TV show, receiving the inevitable pass. The 30-year-old executive, who looked at my partner and myself as a pair of Willy Loman–ish narrative peddlers who had washed up like graying hairballs on his sleek desktop, listened to our spiel and pronounced it “too optimistic.” This was a new one. Hollywood is like Eskimos and snow—they’ve got a million ways to say no. For a century, they peddle fake uplift, the bogus happy ending, and now everything is supposed to be so bleak.

My daughter, who knows far more about current television than I ever will, explained it all to me.

“Things are shitty,” she said. “The politics are shitty. The economy is shitty. You can’t even lie about it anymore.”

Did she really believe this?

Yeah, she did.

“Shitty,” I wrote on my pad, a useful note for further TV pitches.

Later, I felt like weeping. It was no fun to hear my own daughter characterize her world in such a dystopic fashion. What do you do to help someone you love in such a situation? It was time for the voice of experience to step forward. It was time for Wisdom, the font of accumulated knowledge, the voice of experience. In this I cannot say I stepped to the plate. The future was the best I had to offer. That was the extent of my wisdom: Wait. It will seem better in the morning.