Then at some indeterminate time, perhaps in your late 40s, time begins to change. It grows shorter and shorter and the days which once seemed so long and the events which once seemed so far apart are telescoped.

A week barely starts before it's over. First it's Monday and the next thing you know it's Saturday or maybe even Sunday and it's time for the next week to start. Months pass with increasing rapidity. Before January seems to be over, it's already March.

Summer seems so short and autumn's even shorter and then all of a sudden, it's another Christmas. And no longer is it a Christmas with the long anticipation that seemed to precede the Christmases of the past. Christmas comes and goes and it is less a holiday than it once was. You wonder why that is.

Perhaps it's because you get fewer presents as you get older or perhaps it's because you can't seem to think of any really wonderful presents to give to those you love. So you take the easy course and give everyone money.

Whatever the reason, suddenly a new year is upon you and spring seems to be coming even before winter is over.

I've supposed this all to be a part of growing older. But there is a difference, I think, between growing older and growing old. Growing older means that age is a kind of indeterminate era. You know you're aging, but somehow it seems a process that can be postponed. There are still years ahead. There's still time.

You tend to look in the mirror not for signs of age but for signs of youth. There must be some still existing, you think. You tend to compare the face and form you see with those around you who are of equal age, hoping to congratulate yourself on your ability to look younger than you really are. Or at least younger than they are.

And then, again at some indeterminate age, suddenly you know that you are old. The difference can come in subtle ways—the number of hours you sleep (or don't) in a night, the fatigue you accumulate by the time you do go to bed, the number of names you recognize (or more likely don't) in the obituary columns of the newspaper, what you remember and what you've forgotten. (You really don't know what you've forgotten, of course, but sometimes it seems like a lot.)

If you're healthy, your friends may not be. Indeed, suddenly they disappear. They die, of course, but it doesn't seem like death. Rather, it is as if, as the saying used to be, "they went away."

One day they're there and the next week they're gone. For a time their passing leaves a hole in your life, but after a while the hole seems to close, at least partly. They're here, but they're not here.

Death isn't dramatic for most of us. Instead, it comes calling softly like a tap, tap at the door.

The good thing about all this—and there are some good things about getting old—is that there are children and grandchildren who have reached maturity, there is the settled feeling of having done most of the hard things that needed doing in your life, there's knowledge you've acquired (if not necessarily wisdom) and the understanding that whatever you learn in the time that's left is probably not very important to how your life comes out anyway.

Old age is a time of accommodation, even of resignation. I suppose it ought not to be that way, but that's often how it seems.

When I think of it, I always think of W.B. Yeats, the Anglo-Irish poet. His poem "Byzantium" sums it up:

"There is no country for old men..."

Indeed, there is, and Yeats lived to be an old man. He was, indeed, old when he wrote the poem, one I've always liked.

The poem ends with his declaration that if he could somehow retain his identity he will live as a bird set to sing in the gardens of Byzantium:

Once out of nature I will never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths
make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past or passing or to come.

And I suppose that that, in a way, is what we all wish when we grow old, that we will be spared any more bodily hurt and harm, that we will still serve some useful purpose and that it may be as pleasant and as consequential as singing forever.

At least that's what I, in old age, wish for.