Next month I will be 69 years old. Other than a salacious joke on the sexual significance of the number, I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
I mean, when you turn 60, you’re old. When you turn 65 you’re a “senior citizen.” When you hit 70 (which I will next year), you enter the “how can you still be alive?” years.
I have always believed that by the time you’re 60, you’ve lived the life you’re going to live. Okay, you can still have interesting things happen to you, like ending up being intimate with a gorgeous 21-year-old blonde, but the odds of that happening are astronomical unless you have $100 million in the bank.
But by the time you’re 60, you’ve lived the life you’re going to live. You’ve had your love affairs, had your children (if you have any), worked your jobs, done good or bad things, become a rock star (or not), had that best seller on the NY Times list…In other words, you’ve had your chance to live.
Now I’m about to hit 70, which is old in anyone’s book. From now on when I go, no one will say “he died so young.” It will be more like “what took the old geezer so long?”
And yet, as regular readers of this blog know, I am still trying to get my first novel published by a major publisher. Still trying to get a song into the zeitgeist. Still looking for that 21-year-old blonde.
At least one of those things can still happen. That is, if I can manage to avoid falling and not being able to get up.
Mark Bruce, Writer 