I know the aging process is well underway when I go, in the space of what seems like a few weeks, from being the hippy, the youngest one on the block, to being the one who has been there the longest; to receiving offers for grave sites “pre-need;” to watching those my age gradually display gender convergence due to God-knows-what hormonal shift.

More surprises: I go to the New Jersey Transit ticket machine and get what they call a “Senior/Disabled Ticket.” The icon on the machine is a wheelchair. There is a surcharge for buying a ticket on the train. Except for seniors, and presumably, those in wheelchairs. Here’s my guess why old people are allowed to buy tickets on the train with no surcharge: they’re too stupid to use the ticket machines.

I get the first hint of what’s to come one day a few decades ago when an ad agency client (I’m a composer), for whom I had created a musical homage to the Ramones for Atari, says that he was happy he had hired me in spite of me being “an older guy.” I was 41.

Another signal moment came the first time a checkout girl at the supermarket looked through me as if I were a wraith holding a five-dollar bill. Another one was when a woman said “I feel very safe with you.” Translation: you’re harmless because you’re no longer a member of the pool with whom sex is even theoretically possible. Not so long ago, a forty-year-old woman smiled patronizingly and described what she was seeing as “cute” when she saw me entering a note on my iPhone.

Don’t get me wrong: getting old is a luxury, one that JFK never had. I always knew that dying sucks. What’s news is that getting old is just like dying, only slower.

Now, this may appear to be another wacky treatise on age like they sell in the Cracker Barrel gift store—an opportunity to laugh at ourselves, and embrace our inevitable destiny. But I’m serious--I’d like to give other generations a warning so they can be prepared.

I’m 70. I’m fortunate enough to have been spared major health problems—heart attack, stroke, cancer—and I still have my hair. I go to the gym regularly. I meditate, if you’ll excuse the expression, religiously. I do yoga twice a week. I am always the worst. (And when I sign in, I have to define myself as a “senior” or forfeit the three-dollar discount.) I go to Buddhist ceremonies weekly. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs, legal or illegal. I don’t watch TV news (too much stress), and I watch funny movies.

(You’ll perhaps be surprised to hear that, in spite of this, I not only eat meat, I eat red meat. And wear leather shoes. And don’t shop at Whole Foods.)

None of this protects me from the march of time. I don’t kid myself that unpleasant things happen only to those who have earned it. The first question I hear when told that someone has lung cancer is, “Were they a smoker?” Maybe so, but the point of the question is to prove that only those who have sinned—like smokers—get cancer. We virtuous ones are immune.

It’s important to know where to go to feel young, if only for a moment. For me, it’s anywhere there’s a concentration of really old people. Certain overheated restaurants are good. High school reunions are great, especially if you compare yourself to classmates who have been particularly ravaged by time, the ones who look like they’ve been exhumed, and none too gently.

Is there anyone who sees this coming when they are young? I don’t think so. Denial is necessary. Teenagers are immortal; there’d be no armies otherwise. Twenty-somethings know that they will set the world on fire and never face a soul-deadening disappointment. They know—and it’s built into our culture—that they will eventually find “the one.” Whereas Jack Nicholson’s 65-year-old character in “About Schmidt” wonders every morning “Who’s this old lady in my bed?” And she may well have been “the one”—just not the same “one” she was when she was 25.

This is all as it should be. What it comes down to is what it always comes down to: Time spent worrying about traffic accidents, or bone crushing defeats, or divorces, is squandered, and there isn’t enough of it to waste. Live. Have some fun. And be nice to an old person. You’ll be one soon enough.

If you’re lucky.

December 31, 2023

About the writer

Hill’s fiction has appeared in The Southampton Journal, The MacGuffin, Inertia, Page and Spine, Down in the Dirt, and Sexandmurder. My nonfiction has been seen in 34th Parallel and most recently in Irish Pages He’s a Bennington MFA, as well as being a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Moulin à Nef in France, and The Tyrone Guthrie House in Ireland, and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and the Prospect Writer’s House. He’s also been a music producer for Sony, songwriter, film composer, and a teacher at UCLA.