How old is old?

I will be 59 on July 14.
That's one year short of 60. My friend Doreen Tracey, one of the original Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketters, turned 60 a year ago in April.
The idea of being that old absolutely blows my mind and I can only think about it a few minutes at a time.
It seems like only yesterday that I was a rebellious young journalist, angry about the Vietnam War, angry about the way the Democratic Party crushed Eugene McCarthy's presidential chances with a police riot in Chicago and mistrustful of anyone over 30.
I remember how shocking it was when Bob Dylan turned 30. He'll be 63 on Monday, fer Chrissakes!
I was born on the day J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of physicists and engineers hoisted the first atomic bomb to the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower in the New Mexico desert. They detonated the world's first nuclear explosion two days later, so that makes me two days older than the Atomic Age.
Someday, perhaps, I can regale my grandchildren with tales of life before TV and computers and cell phones and CDs and DVDs and even videotape. There were no interstate highways, cars didn't have seatbelts and gas station attendants pumped your gas, cleaned your windshield and checked your oil.
I can tell them how it felt in the autumn of 1962 when President Kennedy faced down Premier Kruschev over Soviet missiles in Cuba. And what it was like to stand all night in the cold waiting to file past Kennedy's casket in the Capitol Rotunda a year later.
When I was a kid, I still had aunts and uncles who lived in the country and used outdoor toilets and hand-crank telephones. We lived in town, but it wasn't until my seventh-grade year that we got dial phones. Up to that point, you picked up the receiver and the operator at the phone company downtown said, "Number please?" Our number was 68. Yeah, that's right. Two digits. My dad was an insurance agent and his office number was 88. But if you said it too fast, the operator might think you just said "8" and connect you with the railroad depot.
I've lived during the administrations of 11 U.S. Presidents and my lifespan represents about one-fourth of the history of the United States. I was looking through my stepson's U.S. History book the other day and was impressed to see it was new enough to include the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. When I was a kid, we ran out of school year before we got to World War II. I also noticed his history text is superficial as hell and is very politically correct when it comes women and minorities.
So, if I'm so incredibly ancient, why don't I feel like it?
Other than occasional transient aches and pains, I feel physically fit and energetic.
I remember my father when he was my age - that was back in 1969 - and he wasn't nearly as active as I am today. The idea of him taking off on solo transcontinental motorcycle trips is inconceivable, but I've been doing it every year for more than a decade and I just bought a new bike last year with the intention of doing it well into the future.
I went to my 40th anniversary high school class reunion last year and found myself wondering, "Who the hell are all these old people?" I told some friends it was like walking into a room full of our parents.
There are a few of my generation who, for whatever reason, have given up, stopped enjoying and are ready to cash in their chips. I have a cousin, an obese woman a year younger than I, who recently disposed of most of her furniture and moved into what amounts to a rest home. I ran into her at her mother's funeral and I was filled with horror and disgust. I can't begin to understand someone who is ready for the old folks' home at 57.
But the big difference for most of us, I think, is we didn't have the Depression and World War II to kill our sense of having fun. Quite the contrary, our parents were dedicated to the idea that we would have all the things they were denied. And, damn, did we! And most of us are having so much fun, we're not about to let a little thing like time stop us.