20 ways to tell if you're officially "old"

• While watching a streaming tv series featuring an actor you haven't seen recently, you can’t believe how old and decrepit he looks. Good grief, he’s your age or only a few years older, he should look better than that! You look him up on Wikipedia and learn he’s 14 years younger than you.

• Your niece just became a grandmother.

• You were always amused by friends who took sweaters to restaurants complaining the A/C was too cold, but now you do, too.

• You won’t go to any venue that features live music because it makes your hearing aids screech, not to mention it is nauseating to see couples your age joylessly dancing to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” 

• You can’t name one Taylor Swift song. 

• When your new personal trainer asks your fitness goal, you tell him you want him to develop an exercise routine that will help you get your butt back because it has mysteriously disappeared which is why you don’t carry your cell phone — you need the curve of your butt to keep your pants from falling around your ankles and, even with a tight belt, they fall down whenever you put the damn phone in your pocket. 

• The day before a hurricane is to arrive, you tell your wife you are going to use your chain saw to remove the palm fronds that are brushing against the top of your pool cage which was damaged during the last hurricane, and that you need her to hold the ladder for you. She refuses, saying someone your age has no business being up on a ladder with a chain saw because you’re either going to fall and break your hip or decapitate yourself or her.  When she leaves, you do it anyway, and sawdust gets in your eyes because you didn’t wear protective goggles. The pain is excruciating and you wind up at the emergency eye clinic. Not that I know anyone this happened to. 

• You’re 150 pages into a book before you realize you’ve read it before.

• Friends are constantly sending you memes or posting on Facebook (used exclusively by old people) about how swell things were in their youth when kids drank water from hoses and didn’t have to wear bike helmets or seat belts. Yeah, the generation that produced Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump sure knew what they were doing.

• Your bridge partners, fellow oldsters, can rattle off the order in which every single card was played in round two of game four three weeks ago but can’t remember who dealt the last hand.

• Hotel clerks ask if you need a disabled room or one near the elevator so you won’t have to walk so far.

• As you are following a Buick down the highway, the jukebox in your head suddenly goes off, playing this jingle: “Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick? A Buick, ’63 Buick.”  

• Your bank has had six different names in the 43 years since you opened your account, but your account number has remained the same. The most recent check number you wrote was 30487. Not that you write more than one or two checks a month these days —you have all your bills on autopay because you worry you’ll forget to pay them.

• As you and your wife are singing along to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” she points out that, for 45 years, you’ve been driving her crazy because you’ve had the lyrics wrong.  Simon’s not accusing the guy who’s so vain about having an affair with the “wife of a postman, wife of a postman.” She’s saying “wife of a close friend.”

• You still have a landline. The only calls you receive on it are robocalls. You have been intending to have it disconnected but you never do because you’re attached to your phone number.

• There was something else you wanted to list here but you can’t remember it.

• As you’re finishing a post about the foibles of growing old, you feel a sudden burst of gratitude as you remember friends who would have given anything to live to be as old as you are. 

• Because you have nothing more pressing to do today, you count the number of bullet points in this post to see if Dryden really listed 20 reasons or if he’s cheating you.