54th: A friend with a macabre sense of humor gives you a crate
of vitamin pills. You laugh like a good sport while privately
deciding to tuck them in a good hiding place and try some when
nobody is looking.

  55th: After rising and while facing the mirror, you think: "Oh, to be
50 again!"

56th: Have you ever felt better? You sure have.

57th: There will be a big birthday dinner tonight with sexy guests of
both genders, or gendery guests of both sexes if you prefer, but suppose
that embarrassing stomach rumbling starts up again during dessert.  You
load the CD player with "Night on Bald Mountain," just in case.

58th: "Oh, to be 55 again!"

59th: Remember how tired and worn-out your parents looked at this age?
By comparison, you don't look a day over 35. Maybe 49.

60th: Lovely, lovely! The big six-oh, and you don't feel a bit worse
than you did when you were still in your 50's yesterday.

61st: It is amazing how unfaded you look by candlelight.  And the
old           drain -- brain, that is -- has it ever been sharper, more
alert, quicker to grasp Frankenstein's theory of relativity or coin a side
splitting catechism
-- solecism? -- prism? -- fanaticism? -- Manicheanism? -- what's the
word I'm looking for?

62d: Witticism.

63d: You've had better birthdays. A lovely young woman calls
you "Pops." If you are female, a charming young man -- great
pecs and abs! -- puts an arm out to save you from stumbling into a pile
of lawn fertilizer and says, "Watch your step, mother."

64th: Retire? You'll never retire. Why, you haven't even reached the
peak of your intellectual powers yet, for Heaven's sake! No way are you
ever going to go to Florida and spend the rest of your life eating the
early-bird special every night.

65th: You realize that there are worse things than being 65, but you
prefer not to think of them.

66th: Waking, you feel astonished, and say to your wife, "When I was 21
I never expected to be a 66-year-old man." Or, if  female, "I've been
21 and now I'm 66, and when I remember that at 21 I made the obligatory
youth journey to Woodstock, there's a lot to be said for being 66."

67th: Why keep trying to kid yourself when it costs money?  You
decide to start saying "Yes" when people ask if you're
eligible for the geezer discount.

68th: So you're 68. All sorts of people have been 68.  Methuselah. If
anyone telephones, say you're out.

69th: You're tired of being a liberal. What's more, you don't even feel
liberal anymore. You must have been crazy to think that was a good
time you had in that mess at Woodstock. You decide to become a
right-wing nut. Alternatively, if tired of lifelong conservatism, you
become a left-wing extremist. Anything to show you're still
rambunctious.

70th: You hope the children don't drop by today. They always ask if
your arteries, kidneys, liver and lights are failing, and whether it
isn't time to surrender your car keys.

71st: You decide not to get down on your knees all day long so you can
feel wonderful about not having to ask somebody to help you
get up.

72d: What's this! The children's hair gray? It makes you feel old for
the first time.

73d: How wonderful being old enough to see your teenage
grandchildren abuse your children the way your children used
to abuse you.