Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late

On my fiftieth birthday someone asked me what it felt like to reach that elevated age. The only thing that occurred to me was that suddenly a century didn't seem like such a long time. The prof''s comment the other day about recalling a time before cable television evoked in me a deep sense of time's rapid passage. That and the advent of a new year. Not to mention a glance in the mirror. All those kids I was in elementary school with are getting old. Not older, old. I'm still astonished that there are old rockers. I was in high school when a classmate showed up with the first LP of a then unknown young singer named Elvis Presley. I was already nine-years old when the first man to ever fly an airplane, Wilbur Wright, died. One need only go back ten years before my birth to the first talkie movies. When I was born there were still sailing whaleships on the ocean, and pendulum clocks weren't just artifacts. As Bernard Baruch once said, "old-age is fifteen years older than I am."