By the time you have (gratefully) forgotten this column, I will have reached the biblical termination age of three score and ten. I will then be living on borrowed time, checking each knock at the door to see if the caller is carrying a scythe or has double parked a sweet chariot.

I will no longer be just elderly, or a pensioner or retiree or golden-ager or whatever other pandering euphemism is used by irreverent pups under sixty. I will be OLD, officially and undeniably, and that condition has certain advantages.

When Mark Twain achieved his seventieth birthday, he listed a few of the good points. For one, you need never again lie about a previous engagement or mysterious illness when invited to some event you don't want to attend.

"..If you shrink at thought of these things," said Twain, "you need only reply: 'Your invitation honors me...but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney corner and smoke my pipe and read my book and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection.' For you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase. You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out..."

I was delighted to discover that I have for many years unknowingly followed the Twain nourishment formula. "In the matter of diet, which is another main thing," he said at his birthday party, "I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince pie after midnight..."

It is time, too, to take a truthful look at yourself, not just to be critical but to admire some of the trophies we have won over our many summers. I like poet Marjorie Agosin's little tribute to her stomach:

Midsummer, at seventy years of age,
this Sunday the seventh
my belly is still with me
and proudly goes parading along the shore
some say I am already old and ugly
that my breasts are entangled with my guts
but my belly is here at my side a good companion
and don't say it's made of fat
rather tender morsels of meat toasting in the sun.

In his old age, philosopher Lin Yutang compared human life to a poem. "No one can say that a life with childhood, manhood and old age is not a beautiful arrangement: the day has its morning, noon and sunset, and the year has its seasons, and it is good that it is so.

"There is no good or bad to life except what is good according to its own season. And if we take this biological view of life and try to live according to the seasons, no one but a conceited fool or an impossible idealist can deny that human life can be lived like a poem." And that's a worthy idea--although in my case I fear the poem would likely be a limerick, and a rude one at that.

Author Florida Scott-Maxwell said: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go--lived, balanced, over?"

Well, though I admit to being a crabby old man who has missed far more goals than he has reached, I still harbor hopes that I have made--or still have time to make--a small step toward leaving at least some parts of the Earth rich and beautiful for those yet to arrive. I was raised on a wilderness homestead, and have had a long, last look at the natural world when it was still so young that you could see the manufacturer's label on it, before the enormous destruction of forest, fish and wildlife of the last half-century.

That alone may be enough to keep me alive and writing angry letters to newspaper editors for many a season. Meanwhile, I'm off to my chimney corner, and anyone who wants me can just get used to waiting. I'm old, dammit!


... I forgot to add that old age truly does make you forgetful, despite all the jokes. The other day I noticed that a bathroom towel rack was coming apart, and went looking for the glue to fix it. I looked in most of the likely places--you know, the refrigerator, the liquor cabinet, the laundry hamper--and was about to rummage through my sock drawer when I found Dorothy already there. "I'm looking for the glue," she said. "One of the towel racks is coming apart."

"So am I!" I said, amazed. "And I'm also looking for the glue. But don't you know where it is?"

"Haven't got a clue," said my wife. I realized this was a serious situation.

"This is a serious situation," I said. "We can't BOTH go like this at the same time, or we're doomed."

Having a bad memory is, in fact, one of the worst things I can remember. There's my friend Alan, for example, a sturdy man of only a bit past middle age, who signed up for one of those memory improvement courses in order to polish his executive job skills. The first session included memorizing a word-association formula for the second session, and Alan was doing this on his way home on the bus, and missed his stop. "I had to walk a long way back in the rain, and I'd forgotten my umbrella," he admitted.

"About this memory course," his wife said as he stood dripping in the hallway. "Why don't you forget it?"

Even those in the initial pride and arrogance of youth can show a tendency to forget things. I wish I could remember, for example, all the times our kids forgot about curfews or doing their homework. Once when our children were in their teens Dorothy and I went away for a few days, but bad weather sent us home earlier than planned and we found the kids throwing a party for about 753 of their friends.

"Didn't we tell you NO parties?" I roared. "Hey," they said, "we forgot."

An old friend is a professor of psychology at whatchacallit university in Ontario and has set himself up as a memory expert. I ran into him in a parking lot in Vancouver just last week. He was looking for his car. "Hello, George, good to see you," he cried. "Let's just find my car and then we could go and have a coffee somewhere. All these damn rental cars look alike to me."

We looked for about 10 minutes. "It wouldn't really matter right now," he said, "if I hadn't left my briefcase in the trunk."

"What's that you're carrying?" I asked.

"What," he stammered. "How did THAT get there?"

I suggested we go to the little cafe across the street. "What for?" he asked. Coffee, I said. "Say, that's a good idea," said the professor. I don't recall much of our conversation except for the professor telling me that he's soon to appear as a memory expert on one of those TV talk shows.

"I've been studying memory improvement techniques for I can't say how many years," said my friend, whose name eludes me at the moment. "You really should try it, Harry."

He got stuck for the coffee, though. I'd forgotten my wallet.

Tony Eberts is a columnist and environmentalist whose 40 years with The Vancouver Province newspaper won him much esteem and respect. abeberts@telus.net