SENIOR MUSE

May is Older Americans Month (fka Senior Citizens Month). Back in 1963, when the month was established, I was “a young man full of idealism and vigor” (as Barack Obama joked recently at the White House in a different context), a year out of the army with the rest of my life ahead of me. Now here it is 2016, some 53 years later, and I still have the rest of my life ahead of me. Amazing.

So much for the glass-half-full outlook. In the other hand, the glass is half-empty:

COME TO THINK OF IT

Old age is a sad estate.
With it comes wisdom,
But it comes so late.

Now recall innocent youth.
Ignorance was bliss,
But less than truth.

Why can’t life be in reverse:
Born knowing the score,
Blameless in the hearse?

The old joke about old age is that there’s not much future in it. Maybe so, but I like to think ‘outside the box.’ One thing for sure: Old age is no place for sissies. –Bette Davis

Well, never let it be said that this blog is no place for good quotes. Most of the following goodies aren’t funny, but then, old age isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either. So, until further adieu:

Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative. –Maurice Chevalier

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man. –James Thurber

A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, “At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas.” –Claude Pepper

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late. –Benjamin Franklin

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age. –Victor Hugo

There’s no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow. –Fay Weldon

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age. –Sinclair Lewis

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity, and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. –Robertson Davies

Not even old age knows how to love death. –Sophocles

By the time you’re 80 years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it. –George Burns (who, in case you forgot, lived to age 100)

And now for the BIG (double) FINISH: