I hear it more often as time goes by: “Growing old is hell, isn’t it?”
  It is, but not so much for the obvious reasons as because of the perceptions of the young.
  To young people, old folks are a different kind of animal—slow of thought and movement, weak, deaf, and perhaps a bit stupid.
  What young people don’t yet realize is that old people are the same boys and girls they have always been, ageless in their own minds and spirits and continually startled by the wrinkled geezers looking at them from the far side of the mirror.
  At 57, I’m the youngest boy in my neighborhood. In retirement haven Sequim, I’m still on the young side of the median, but I’m old enough now to see what’s coming.
  When I offer my seat on a crowded bus to a young woman, she'll often decline. It takes me a moment to realize I look like someone she should be giving her seat to.
  If I smile at a woman my daughter’s age as I pass her on a sidewalk, I’m probably smiling just because her attractiveness invites a smile. If she returns the smile, it’s probably because I remind her of her grandfather.
  The most frequent internal reminder that I’m not as young as I used to be is the amount of time it takes to recover from strenuous exercise. I can still do everything I always could, but it takes longer to rebound from a four-day hike or a weekend of cutting firewood.
  A friend a few years older than I is touchy about being treated as an old man. He resents the assumption that he qualifies for senior citizen discounts even more than he resents qualifying for them. But he laughs at himself when he tells of playing softball recently with a group he played with when young, running out a bloop single and falling on his face halfway to first base because his legs can’t keep pace with his sprinting mind.
  When a man in his 80s complains of how little time there is in the day, I don’t know how to tell him it’s because he does things more slowly than he did when he was younger. He wouldn’t believe it, so I keep my mouth shut and hope I can remember this if I’m lucky enough to reach his age.
  Old people sometimes have difficulty convincing young doctors that their medical problems are specific and real and not just normal symptoms of old age, as if old age were a disease.
  Old people resent being spoken to in raised voices as though they were hard of hearing, especially the ones who are hard of hearing.
  When I read obituaries—and I always do—I note that someone born in the late 1930s was only a few years older than I. The next line mentions the age at death and it’s in the low 60s, old in my young mind’s frame of reverence, and it’s a shock to realize that I will very soon be one of those “old” folks in their 60s.
  One recent obituary especially saddened me, though it was as inevitable as they all are. He’d died in his early 90s, but he was a sharp and sturdy octogenarian when I met him while hunting elk in muzzle-loading rifle season a few years ago.
  He was carrying his rifle and a crude crutch, a stick to rest his rifle on while shooting. His left arm wouldn’t support the weight. He said his doctor told him he needed surgery on his ailing shoulder, but the old man had told his doctor it would have to wait until after elk season.
  That kind of old age, I can handle. I think I’d rather risk dying in the woods at 85 than hold out for dying in bed at 95.
  But that’s easy for me to say. I’m still a kid, so what do I know?
  If I live to be 85, I’ll still be a kid, just as the elk hunter with a bum shoulder was. He wasn’t old then, and he wasn’t old when he finally died.
  Barring some degenerative brain disease, I won’t be old when I die, no matter how many birthdays I will have had. Neither will you. 
  Everybody dies young.