A fat man with a stubble beard, a baseball cap and a dirty sport shirt sat in a broken lawn chair in front of a rack of stuffed animals and silver chains.  For a dollar he would tell you your age. It didn’t seem to me to be a particularly useful commodity.  I was seven.  I knew that; I didn’t have to pay someone to tell me.

It was the county fair and as we stood among the people crowded around his booth, yes even I understood he wasn’t telling them their age, he was guessing it. And there was some talent involved in that.

After all, to me there were only three ages: kids my age, big kids and grownups.  A few years later there were kids my age, little kids and grownups. And all parents were the same age as my parents. Once I was among the grownups, instead of getting clearer, everything blurred even more. I assumed bosses were older and co-workers were all the same age as me. That seems to say more about authority than age, which may explain why I’m not a good authority figure.

No surprise then that age has always confounded me. I never understood what my parents meant when they told me to act my age.  I knew they were telling me to quit doing whatever I was doing and start behaving the way they wanted me to, which probably was actually some age much older than mine. Somehow I don’t think Mozart’s parents told him to act his age, probably because by all accounts he was acting their age most of the time.

So what does that mean? How do you know when you’re doing something that is “your age?” I can’t run and jump the way I could when I was a kid, though I think I can – until I try.  I’ve been known to jump up at intersections and high five the Don’t Walk hand on traffic signals.  Often even when sober. You don’t see a lot of 60 year olds doing that, I guess. There’s a line in a song that pretty much says it for me: “I’m older than I act, younger than I look.”

When the dogs walk me in the morning, I am reminded to stand up straighter when we go past someone whose shoulders are stooped and I think to myself “I wonder who that old guy is; poor bastard, he must be…..well, hell, he’s probably my age.”  My booth would have been out of stuffed animals and silver chains shortly after it opened.

I hope I never get as old as I am.