60

AN EDITED VERSION OF THIS PIECE APPEARS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES "LETTERS"SECTION ON JANUARY 11, 2013

Re “For Each Age, Its Agonies,” by Frank Bruni (column, Jan. 8): 

Wait until you try 60 on for size. This is when you understand that if business success has not somehow fallen in your lap, it will take a miracle for it to appear from this point forward. 

When illusions concerning your physical being begin to recede even quicker than the few remaining hairs on your head. When the thought of dying is somehow no longer quite the abstraction it was before. 

When you are most likely a child now who no longer has parents, or if one is still alive, you are witness to his or her physical or mental dissolve, or quite possibly both. 

When you realize that your jokes are funny only to you. 

Wherever one is on the journey through life, that is the moment that appears more intense than any other age could possibly be. If I am lucky, I will get past 60, and when I find myself at 70, look back and wonder what all the noise was about. Just as I did in all the decades before.