As someone who is close to "turning 65", I'm struck with the question because it keeps barreling through my mind like a speeding hearse on its way to drop off my corpse at our neighborhood graveyard. It all reverts back to the reality of the situation. I have a mind that insists I'm still stuck in a healthy twenty year old body and then, here's the facts: My body is far from twenty and probably a lot more closer to eighty, but of course there's the old refrain, "Age is just a number" and that number can sweep the range from young to very old in a matter of hours. Try sitting down in your chair. How old do you feel sitting there? Now try getting up and walking a few steps or try tying your shoes. Now tell me how old do you feel? Or, if you're a male, how often do you have to move your old bones to go take a pee in the wee hours of the morning and hope that the stream is strong enough to reach the toilet bowl and not trickle down your leg?
Anyway....Getting old is literally a pain but my hope is that wisdom and literary talent is a hop skip and a jump further along than these old bones will carry me. As long as my index fingers can still peck at these keys on my laptop, I should be good to go, at least for a few more years before the worms decide it's time to feast on me. I do take solace in the fact that 165 authors, poets and journalists just recently made it to the centenarian level before they gave up the ghost.
I am humbled and reminded that I'm now 40 years younger than the "oldest author ever". James Willis Downing, born August 22, 1913 and who died on February 13, 2018, a lieutenant in the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor, wrote an autobiography, titled The Other Side Of Infamy: My Journey through Pearl Harbor and the World of War, at the ripe old age of 102. James died at 104. So, the answer to my question? I guess I have a few more miles in me before I hit the dirt.