December 6, 2020:
She was always so patronizing to younger adults.
"Kids", she called the neighbor couple, although at the time they were in their middle twenties and she could not have been more than five or six years older.
It's as if she were unable to conceive, much less form, adult relationships. To express affection, its object must be cute, in a child-like or pet-like way granting her superiority.
I should have known this when much later in life I made my attempt to connect. I'd forgotten my own major insight, that as people age they grow more like themselves, not less. So that my attempt crashed and burned, inevitably, on her age-old inability to show respect.