When I was twenty I had a suspicion that I would crash and burn
at age thirty. The idea of thirty seemed like such a very long
way away when viewed from twenty. But then I became thirty and
decided that I was just getting into the swing of things, that
thirty wasn’t an end, it was a beginning. At thirty, the idea of
being sixty five became the alien target. But here I am, my
sixty fifth birthday on the books and I am thinking in terms of
eighty. As time goes by, my old gets older. I wonder, when my
time does come, if I will feel old then, or if I will feel
young.  I am already suffering from the disorientation that
happens when one generation hands off to the next. Never static,
time moves on and things change. The people who are celebrities
are virtual strangers to me, the people I identified with
issuing obituaries with depressing regularity. When I look at
the world through the unblinking eye of television, everyone
seems so young. I see the soldiers interviewed as the return
from war and think, my God, wh