Birthday Extra: When I'm Sixty-Four

Today I am sixty-four, and I can’t get those Beatles lyrics out of my head.

Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

When I'm sixty-four?

Paul McCartney was fourteen when he wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four" in the spring of 1956, but the song wasn’t released until 1967 on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. He was twenty-five.

The melody is upbeat enough. Cheerful. A young man shares his plans with his lover for growing old together.

But there’s the rub. “Old.” Sixty-four might as well be one hundred and four from a fourteen-year-old’s perspective. Hell, that was even true at twenty-four and thirty-four, right up until yesterday.

As we age, our perceptions of old age shift. I know people in their twenties who think thirty is old. Sixty-four seems unimaginably ancient.

I don’t feel old at sixty-four. Whether I am is a matter of perspective. I know one or two eighty-four-year-olds who might consider sixty-four downright youthful.

I’ve been thinking about sixty-four a lot lately. I’m not worried. Joe will continue to need me well past sixty-four. As for feeding me, well, I’m the one who cooks for both of us.

Three years ago, on my sixty-first birthday, I wrote in response to a thought-provoking CBS Sunday Morning segment on aging: "That our culture bombards us with ageist messages from youth, that anything equating youth with 'better' is inherently ageist, and that people start believing that aging itself is undesirable all seem true enough."

Well, that was three years ago. Now, at age sixty-four, those words resonate even more.

So for my birthday this year, I’m giving myself a new marker of old age. Let’s throw a dart and put it at eighty-four.

I am too busy enjoying life to fret over some old Beatles’ lyric. I guess I’ll worry about being old in twenty years.

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