I can remember my grandparents being old in their 50s. Harder childhoods in the Depression, for sure, but some of it was medical, some was attitude, some was culture, some was substance abuse, 20th-century style. I am now in my 50s, a few months short of the age my grandfather was when he died of (alcohol-exacerbated) natural causes.
I like to take the time from today to some past event I remember and project it backwards. If I do that with my age (75) I wind up in the Grant Administration.
At some point, quite a while ago, I figured out that the time from then back to when I learned about transistors in grad school was longer than the time between the transistor being invented and me learning about it.
I’m ‘old’ . Retired. But, I walked the dogs today and road my bike today, and played Pickle ball yesterday.
And now I’m about to ride my bike again to our mailbox.
I currently consider my bike recreation. But It may become transportation. We see the writing on the wall.
I hate digital cameras. In every picture taken of me with a digital camera, my hair is white and I’m much fatter.
Whereas pictures of you taken with an accordian-fold camera with glass plates all show a man in his prime, right?
Exactly!
Daguerrotypes FTW!!
The age I am in my dreams is all four of these simultaneously.
I’ve noticed that when I meet strangers my age, they look like old geezers.
But when I see old schoolmates, they have a few gray hairs, and a few wrinkles, but to me they look almost as good as they did back then.
For me it’s a conscious eye.
I’m 19 years older than Wilford Brimley was when he did Coccoon.
To be fair, Wilford Brimley was born an old man.
Just like Ernest Borgnine was born a gruffy middle-aged man, a type he played throughout his whole career.
This line of discussion has me curious to see an Abe Vigoda baby picture.
In 1972, Tom T. Hall recorded a song called “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine,” in which an “old man” is telling him his philosophy on life. The “old man” was a month shy of 66. At the time, Tom T. was 36, so that probably was old to him.
I’m finding danged few pictures of him even as a young man. This photo is said to have been him in the Army during WWII, when he would have been in his early 20s.
It probably doesn’t help that he had very few TV or movie acting credits (and none of them particularly significant) prior to 1972, when he was in The Godfather, and was already 51 years old; he had started working as an actor in the late '40s, but was apparently mostly a stage actor (and maybe some radio) until The Godfather.
I just calculated that my birth is closer to the outbreak of World War I than to the present day.
In that photo, he’s nowhere near looking like an old codger, but if someone told me it was him in his early thirties and sounded like they knew what they were talking about, I’d accept it.
Mine is closer to the Whitechapel Murders of Jack the Ripper than to the present.
Indeed. I’ll be 57 in October. 57 years before I was born was the Titanic iceberg shenanigans.