Think about that. Gail Collins has been. Excerpt:

A lot of the great stars of ’60s music were born during World War II, clocking in just ahead of the baby boom. So they’ve always been the senior citizens of their own, spectacularly youth-oriented generation. When they were young, they wrote songs about getting old. Paul McCartney was playful in “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Paul Simon was affectionate in “Old Friends,” when he mused “how terribly strange to be 70.”

“It is strange,” said Simon, who is now 71. “It’s not terrible, but it is strange.” The old people he imagined when he was in his 20s — “sharing a park bench quietly” — most definitely did not go on tour. “I was thinking of my grandfather. What he was is a lot different from what I am.”

I wonder if it’s true that we think of aging differently, as a cultural matter, than did recent generations, or if that’s just a form of denial on the part of aging people. Reading this, I, a Stones fan from my youth, recalled making a birthday cake to celebrate Mick’s 40th birthday. This was the summer I was 16; Mick seemed impossibly old. He was born the same year my mother was, for crying out loud! To me, at that time, it seemed to me that some sort of Rubicon had been crossed. Forty, man, that’s harsh.

And now I’m 46. The thing is, I don’t desire to be younger. I’ve actually enjoyed my life a little bit more with each passing year. True, I wish it were easier to stay in shape, but I’ll take that trade-off for what I’ve gained in wisdom and experience, and the ability to see more deeply into things than I had in my youth, when I was filled with restless passion.

That said, I look at the geriatric Rolling Stones still touring, and I don’t find it especially admirable — Wow, they’re still rocking! — but just … weird. I don’t want to be that kind of old person, pretending I’m still young. It is considered by many to be a virtue that the Stones can and do behave today as they did as young men. Again, I don’t begrudge them this, heaven knows, but their performances today strike me as like a secular liturgy for a culture that does not know how to age with grace and wisdom, because it fetishizes youth.

For the record, I don’t necessarily want to be what my grandfather was at 70, but the idea of an old age in which I share the park bench quietly with someone strikes me as a pretty good deal.