You engage in some reflection when you ' re aged to perfection

A few years after graduating from high school I returned there and was surprised to find that girls of the same age I had dated now looked like children, and the only ones I was attracted to were teachers. This was an "am I really this old" moment, possibly my first. Many men have another one when they find themselves attracted to someone much younger and suddenly realize that if the other person knew, she would be appalled. This is the real reason older men have better manners. They don't want to see horror on someone else's face! Certain milestones make us think about how far we've come, which often is just another way of saying, how much we've aged. Apart from the obvious ones like birthdays, we may take stock when we see our one-year-older relatives at Thanksgiving. Career milestones do it, too. Stacy Loe is retiring from television just shy of her 20th anniversary in the profession so she can spend more time with her young son Cole. Given this and her recent on-air visit to her old high school, she may be feeling older, though she can still pass for twentysomething. Paul Udell told Stacy of his own "am I really this old" moment, a visit to New York on which someone offered her seat on the subway. It was Stacy's retelling of his story that made me decide to write this, because there is a positive side to such aging moments, something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, and Udell is a good example of it. Udell has been retired for years but he could slip into the anchor's chair tomorrow and be better than any of us. He's got personality and wit he hasn't used yet. Who cares what his age is? (I don't know what his age is.) And he's not the only one. Lyle Galdeira was one of the smoothest anchors I ever watched and working outside television has only partially grayed him! And Dan Cooke came back from his own hiatus better than ever. The good news is that if you keep your bad health habits down to a few, see a doctor when you're sick, and brush your teeth enough to keep them in your head, you can feel as good in your middle ages as you did in your youth. This is no small thing. It is one of the most important unique features of modern times compared to times past. In Roman times, 40 years was considered a reasonably good life, and 60 years a long one, and I'm not just talking about emperors. By the 1700s, people could live in their eighties - Haydn did - but dying before middle age was still exceedingly common. As recently as the early 1900s, a part of almost everyone's childhood was losing a brother or sister to illness, and the only reason more people didn't die of cancer was that they died of something else first. If you lived into middle age it was probably without your teeth, and every large household had someone who was partially crippled or hobbled by something. And me? At 56 I feel stronger than I did at 16, despite have grown heavy and gray. Even the illness that put me in the hospital early this year has not changed that. It's true that I never smoked, but the awful bachelor's diet of my youth has only slightly improved in recent years, and that mostly because of the happy accident of moving to a place where the fish and vegetables are good. The reason those "am I really this old" moments are so striking is precisely because we do not feel our age. This is a good thing. It may be an economic bad thing that some older people have to keep working, but I prefer to look forward to the very real possibility that I can work for decades more if I want to.