Age and Innocence

When I turned 50 a younger friend asked me, as someone inevitably will each time we tick off another decade, how it felt. I thought about it briefly and then answered that it suddenly occurred to me a century isn't nearly as long as I used to think. When you're a youth, 100 years is about as close as you can come to forever. As you get older, a century becomes a much more easily comprehensible time frame. Now that I'm a sestagenarian I realize that one need only multiply my current age by about 30 to be back at the time of Christ's birth. Multiply my present number of years by only around two hundred, and we're all the way back with the hunter-gatherers, before the advent of agriculture. What's really scary is that only 6 and a half times my current age separates me from the birth of Shakespeare. Gosh, I feel as if I must know somebody who knew him.