In real life, I\u2019m about to turn 70, or someone who looks a lot like me in the mirror in the morning is about to turn 70. It\u2019s 2020, and I was born in 1950, which would tend to insinuate by basic mathematical calculation that I\u2019m now almost<\/em> (let\u2019s not get carried away!) 70. My birthday is still a ways away in June.<\/p>\n

But just a minute. Me, 70? <\/em>\u00a0<\/em>That can\u2019t be right. I don\u2019t feel like 70. I don\u2019t think like 70. At least I don\u2019t think that I think like a 70-year-old thinks. And who knows how a 70-year-old thinks anyway?<\/em> For one, many of us in the past never got to this point in life; lifespans were much shorter. And for two, many of the rest of us who did and have gotten to be 70 and beyond are too busy with aches and pains, doctor\u2019s appointments, yoga, seeking public office, looking for partners in their 20\u2019s and 30\u2019s, getting drunk in the afternoon or Oy vey<\/em> celebrating a thousand other ways of denying to even think about noting.<\/p>\n

That being said, I have to admit that people now ask for my opinion a lot more than they used to. And at times people give me to believe by the way they listen to my responses that my observations of life might actually have some weight. The weight of air,<\/em> truth be told: Little do these people know how little I know. You\u2019ve lived so much and seen so much,<\/em> people now say. But just for the record, being 70 or thereabouts doesn\u2019t make anything anyone of us says or does right, deep, attractive or even reasonably well-thought-out just because. Good Lord, Trump is 73. And in the interests of political fairness, Biden is 77, Warren – just like me – is 70 this year, and Sanders is 78.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t die in my 20\u2019s, or in my 30\u2019s. Or in my 40\u2019s or even in my 50\u2019s though I angsted about dying all through those years plenty \u2013 is angst even a verb in English?<\/em> And, not even as a small aside, I have been known to have suicidal thoughts. Now, many of my friends and family members from those times are gone, internal collateral damage to my obstinate refusal to make a decision to end my life long ago.<\/p>\n

Get over it, just get on with your life, <\/em>I hear you saying. Every single one of us is getting older day in day out. It\u2019s called being alive! <\/em>(That\u2019s you again.) My New York therapist used to put it to me in as many words during our sessions. You\u2019ll be dead, buried and gone forever,<\/em> she would say. Whatever this is, this is better<\/em>, her words.<\/p>\n

I get it. I got it even when I wasn\u2019t even close to being 70.<\/p>\n

I celebrated my 50^{th<\/sup> birthday in a swell hotel in Paris. Swell is arch, of course. But the hotel was swell not because of its meager 2-person ancient elevator, nor for its exorbitant room rates, and not even for its oh so chic and tastefully re-imagined rooms, but because the croissants, butter and jam in the hotel dining room in the morning were why croissants were ever invented. It wasn\u2019t what I had planned on that visit to Paris, but it\u2019s what I remember – I enjoyed the perfect croissant in France on my 50th<\/sup> birthday.<\/p>\n}

And for my 60^{th <\/sup>birthday, I was in\/at\/on Machu Picchu \u2013choose your preposition<\/em> – in Peru. To be honest, I was flailing in the shade of Inca precision rock constructions at a great height fighting for breath due to my asthma for much of my visit. But I was there. And if I\u2019m being totally honest, my favorite part of my visit to Cuzco and Machu Picchu was the one night I spent at the railroad hotel in Ollantaytambo, an overlooked calming way station on the mythical route between present day Peru and its distant past. The esthetic sparseness of my room and its soaring mountain vistas impressed and calmed me. Not to mention that it was there that I first learned how to set my iPad alarm clock. It worked. I made my early morning train \u2013- it was literally outside the hotel door — to get to as it turned out a lack of breath high in the Peruvian Andes.<\/p>\n}

I remember both decade birthdays for odd unplanned details. My decades have always been mathematically easy. I was 10 in 1960, 20 in 1970 and so on.<\/p>\n

Bigger plans tend to go by the wayside. Intentions go by the wayside. Twice in my life, I thought I was going to move to Barcelona. It never happened. I also thought I was going to live in Mexico City. That hasn\u2019t happened either. Unanticipated turns of events, on the other hand, have come about. I lived in an 1850\u2019s cottage down a dirt road in upstate New York for years. And then, I spent years in Sarasota, Florida. Florida is never a place that I would have pictured myself in when younger. And did I ever think I was going to live in South America? No. And yet here I am, 10 years on, a resident of Bogot\u00e1, Colombia.<\/p>\n

I did spend many of the middle years of my life in New York City, and I celebrated many birthdays there.<\/p>\n

I arrived in New York in 1979. I was 29. I hate you,<\/em> someone said to me at a party just this past weekend in Bogot\u00e1 – not for how easy it is for me to remember how old I am in any specific year, but because You lived in New York in the 70\u2019s and 80\u2019s!<\/em> \u00a0There it is again, You\u2019ve lived through so much.<\/em><\/p>\n

Just to be clear, I never went to Studio 54. I never hung out with Andy, or Bianca, or Liza. I never went to the Anvil or any of the other sex clubs. I was just a regular Joe eking out a living at minimum wage in an extraordinary city at an extraordinary moment in time. I loved every moment of those years, every daily sweaty running for the subway, every bounding up staircases at Grand Central and every getting to my morning midtown classroom to teach just on time. I loved every getting home late at night, having earned just that little bit of money that made it possible for me to continue living in New York City.<\/p>\n

I loved being young in New York in the 1980\u2019s. Now, people believe that just to have been there, to have walked on those streets where a legal decision allowed booksellers along 2^{nd<\/sup> in the 50\u2019s blocks to sell hardcover bestsellers at discounted prices, where pasta was still being freshly made at a popular restaurant window that I passed every day on 43rd,<\/sup>, where there was still an Automat on 42nd<\/sup> is the equivalent of having lived through Nirvana. Who knows?<\/p>\n}

I do remember that my older brother – we were peas of the same pod, literally \u2013 when he was visiting from Ireland sat me down in front of the Citicorp Building at 53^{rd<\/sup> and 3rd<\/sup> when I was 32 or 33. I was on a lunch break from teaching classes. Life goes fast,<\/em> he told me. Embrace this. Live,<\/em> were his exact words. Don\u2019t fuck around,<\/em> are the words that I remember, though I don\u2019t think that those are the words that he said. Don\u2019t fuck this up <\/em>are more specifically the words that I remember now.<\/p>\n}

Did I or didn\u2019t I fuck it up? <\/em>I don\u2019t know. My brother, one of my few judges, is long gone. Now, it\u2019s just me.<\/p>\n

And where am I going to celebrate being 70? That I don\u2019t know either. But 80 is next on the horizon. And just for the record, and according to what I hear, 80 is the new 60.<\/p>\n

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