“How terribly strange to be ... seventy.”

If you hang around this life long enough, you get old enough. As of today, I am seventy years of age -- a new decade, and another reminder of how far I've gone.

Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes of the old friends

Younger women tell me I don't look seventy, more like fifty-five or sixty. (No, I'm not making this up.) Then they'll assure me that "age is just a number." That's when I assure them that no one over the age of fifty ever said that. By that time, you know better. At least I did.

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

So far, I have yet to experience (as I knock on wood) some of the more serious afflictions of old age, including a stroke, a heart attack, or any form of cancer. Then again, throwing out my back during the "snowmaggedon" of 2009 (or whenever it was) has led to a herniated disc in my lower lumbar region, and eventually, a slight curviture of the spine (which has cost me two or three inches in height). And don't get me started on my arthritis. My left knee has seen better days.

Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy

They say that "sixty is the new forty." So what, then, is seventy?

Perhaps it is the time to remember that "man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." The men in my family have been known to live a long time. Indeed, my father was afflicted with multiple sclerosis for half his life, and lived to be eighty-six, while his mother lived to be one hundred.

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears

But tonight I will be properly feted at that little Irish pub down the street and on the cornerI will be treated to a steak dinner, share a glass of wine with my dearest Celia, and top it off with some form of dessert with a lighted candle stuck in it, while the staff is pressed (happily, one can only hope) into singing "Happy Birthday, dear Davy!" And for one evening, I will enjoy the moment, as time marches on, as it is wont to do for us all.

And so it goes.