I was born in 1952. That makes me 66 but I don't feel 66. Matter of fact, I don't even know what 66 feels like. I only know I haven't experienced it yet…except maybe first thing in the morning when I've been up half the night working. Then I sometimes feel 166 until I wake all the way up, down my morning protein drink and — most importantly — write something. When I'm writing and it's going reasonably well, it feels exactly like it did when I was 18 except I'm not working on a typewriter these days.
66 seems to be when all your friends of roughly the same age (+/-5 years either way) get to talking way too much about age — yours, theirs and the ages of everyone around them. And by "too much," I mean in some cases all the friggin' time. You ask them if they'd like a sandwich and you get "Oh, I remember how good sandwiches were when I was younger." Everything has to be about age and how many of their friends have died and how someone else is really looking their age and, of course, you get unceasing complaints about "These Kids Today" and how the world has changed.
Breaking News: The world changes. Always has, always will. Complaining has yet to stop it.
Now, please understand that I am not saying anyone should hide their age or, worse, lie about their age. Accepting reality is healthy. I'm saying don't obsess about it and surrender to it prematurely. There isn't much you can do to stop the aging process but it seems to me that thinking about it 24/7 is a dandy way to speed it up.
Within the last few years, an obit appeared on this site for a friend of mine whose passing did not come as a shock to me or anyone who knew him. Why? Because he'd been talking about it almost non-stop for the last decade or two. Once he entered what statistics would suggest was roughly the last third of his life, every other sentence he uttered contained some yardage marker like "Well, speaking as an old fart…" or "I probably won't be around to see this but…"
If I mentioned to him I'd just run into a mutual friend, he'd immediately ask, "Oh, how's he looking these days?" Not even "How's he feeling?" but "How's he looking?" In other words, "Does he look his age? Does he look older than I do?" Must we track every wrinkle, every liver spot, every sign of aging on our friends' bodies? This guy did. It got so I couldn't talk to him about almost anything else.
Stop it. Just stop it. Yes, we're all going to die one of these days. Let's not bury each other and ourselves before we have to.
At Comic-Con this past year, I found myself walking down a corridor with an acquaintance who's probably not far from my age. I'm not sure how far. I'm very bad at guesstimating ages of others because I don't obsess on that kind of thing and sometimes clean forget how old I am. Anyway, he started talking to me about how rough it is getting around the con at "our age" and how we were both limping a little.
I know why I was limping a little. I got a new right knee a few years ago and if I don't keep flexing it, it sometimes gets a bit creaky on me. The left knee is also showing signs of soon needing the same upgrade. So yeah, the knees are bad but that doesn't mean I have to feel like all of me is in need of replacement parts.
I don't know for sure why he was limping but I have a hunch. This is another fellow who can connect any subject or any topic to How Old We're All Getting and he just goes on and on about it. And my hunch is that he was limping because he thinks that's how you're supposed to walk when you hit 65.