How to improve writing (no. 124)

My son Ben pointed me to a awkward-sounding sentence in The New York Times. It’s about Nancy Pelosi’s friendship with Joe Biden:

What she did not say is that you can’t make friends of 50 years when you are in your ninth decade, the kind who knew you way back when.

Is this sentence as oddly phrased as Ben thinks it is? I think so. The two not s at the start are confusing, at least for a moment. And the kind falls strangely after ninth decade.

What I think this sentence wants to say is something like this:

What she left unsaid is that you can’t begin fifty-year-long friendships when you’re in your eighties.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 124 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]