Today is my birthday, sixty-one years old. It’s a mixture. I feel it in my arthritic knees that creak and hurt when I stand up and cause me to think of ways to avoid going up stairs. I enjoy my grandsons, one of whom told me this week that I was not boring like grandpas on TV.
Suddenly, many things of interest, like the Supremes second hit single–Baby Love–and the discovery of the structure of DNA, took place forty or fifty years ago. And the people listed in the New York Times obituaries are no longer old fogies I never heard of. This makes makes me feel very old.
But I was also cheated, missing out on being a grown up. I jumped from kid to old guy. As a kid, I looked forward to the day when the classes would be over and I would be the teacher at the front of the room, assigning the homework and grading the tests, but that never materialized for me. I still have a ton of homework and I am still taking tests.