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The Best Is Yet to Come

It's funny how our views of aging change as we grow older.

Take, for instance, this illustration I heard recently:

When you were a kid and someone asked, “So how old are you?” you would say, “I’m five and a half.” And you’d try to hold up five and a half fingers. You’ll probably never hear an adult say, “I’m forty-six and a half.” For some reason, grown-ups just don’t get as excited as kids about those half- or three-quarter-year milestones.

Then when you got a little bit older and started moving into those teen years, you would say, “I’m going to be sixteen.” (You might only be twelve at the time.) Then adulthood finally arrives, and you “become twenty-one.” Very official sounding. You become twenty-one, but then you blink your eyes and you find that you’re turning thirty. What’s happened here? You become twenty-one, you turn thirty, and then you’re pushing forty! You become twenty-one, turn thirty, are pushing forty, and—before you know it—you reach fifty. Then you make it to sixty. Then you build up so much speed that you hit seventy.

After that, it’s a day-to-day thing. You go from your seventies to your eighties, and then it’s, “I hit Wednesday.” Then as you get even older, “I hit lunch today.” Then you hit the century mark and you clear it. Someone says, “How old are you?” And you say, “I’m 101 and a half!"

There’s no question that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. Everything seems to center around young people and what they have to say and what they think about this or that. And sometimes those of us who are getting a bit on in years feel as though we’re not as relevant as we could be.

It had to happen.

We baby boomers are finally coming of age. The generation that said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” is now stepping, incredulous and amazed, into its golden years. How could it be? Where in the world did the years go?

We try to relive our youth.

We keep telling ourselves we’re still young (at heart).

We turn on the radio, maybe to our favorite oldies station, and we hear the old Leo Sayer number “You Make Me Feel like Dancing.” Only we feel like it should be updated to “You Make Me Feel like Napping.”

When you think about it, there are a number of those old sixties and seventies hits that could be revised a little for the benefit of aging baby boomers. For instance, Abba’s “Dancing Queen” from my generation could become “Denture Queen.”

Remember Herman’s Hermits from the British Invasion of the sixties? Their classic “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” could now be “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Walker.”

The Bee Gees’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” could morph into “How Can You Mend a Broken Hip?”

Remember Crystal Gayle’s song “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”? Maybe we could retitle it “Don’t It Make My Brown Hair Blue.”

The old Jerry Lee Lewis classic “A Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On” could become “A Whole Lot of Achin’ Goin’ On.”

And we can’t forget the Beatles. Their famous cut from the once counterculture Sgt. Pepper album “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends” could be “I Get By with a Little Help from Depends.”

The Who’s great anthem about youth, “[Talkin’ ’bout] My Generation,” could now be “[Talkin’ ’bout] My Medication.” You get the idea.

Believe it or not, there are distinct advantages to being older. Have you ever met anyone over one hundred? I’ve had the chance to sit down with a number of these centenarians, and I appreciate their perspective. One reporter asked a 104-year-old woman, “What’s the best thing about being 104?” The old lady thought about it for a moment and said, “There’s no peer pressure."