It's The Grim Reaper on Line 2

A few years ago Bill Cosby published a book about getting old, Time Flies. Somewhere in this book, he noted his shock at looking down one morning in the bathroom and noticing his first gray pubic hair. That was Ol' Coz' first solid intimation of mortality. (And a damn fine one, I might add.)

I'm a baby-boomer. (Attention fellow Boomers: have you noticed how little respect we get? There was yet another trash-the-Boomers article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine this week.) We are supposedly the first generation in absolute, total denial of old age. We're even trying to come up with a new name for it. Apparently we have rejected "senior citizen" just as surely as we rejected the station wagons of our parents' generation, forcing Detroit to come up with the minivan and the SUV, kid-friendly vehicles that we would buy and drive, because they didn't look like anything Mom and Dad had driven.

And then there's all this "50 is the new 30" stuff. In the movie The Lion In Winter, King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is wrapping up his affairs, which for a British monarch in the 12th century meant deciding which son was going to inherit what, because he, old King Henry, had just turned 50. In 1183, far from being the "new 30," 50 was the "old 80," the age at which you started lacing up your sneakers for the walk to the boneyard. He seemed quite insouciant about it all, but then of course he had Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) to keep his mind on other things (knock-down-drag-out fighting) besides dancing with death. As far as I'm concerned, 50-as-the-new-30 only means that these days we expect to die a few years later than our parents did. As swiftly as the years pass the older you get, what kind of comfort is that?

I haven't seen the first gray pubic hair yet, but I can tell you with a great degree of accuracy when I first felt the upward pressure of the younger generation shoving mine out of the way. Or at least of showing itself indifferent to our experience, which amounts to the same thing. Remember how your Dad would tell you that he used to walk five miles to school, and it was uphill both ways? Remember how you tuned him out? This was my moment of that.

It was the week immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In those first days after the attacks, everyone was rushing out to donate blood. It was largely an exercise in what-else-can-we-do, since there were so few actual survivors of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and none at all in Shanksville, PA. But Americans collectively felt that they had to make some gesture of solidarity with the victims, some symbolic expression of union in adversity, and local blood banks were swamped with donors.

The company I was working for at the time was as enthusiastically involved in this push as anyone else. A company-wide blood drive was announced, and as a writer working in the marketing department, I was asked to draft an in-house e-mail message to all employees, encouraging them to step up and give blood.

I sat down at the old laptop, cracked my knuckles and got to work.

"September 11, 2001 has now joined December 7, 1941 and November 22, 1963 as one of those dates that will remain burned into our national consciousness for generations to come," I wrote in context. In all, I cranked out about 400 words, encouraging everyone in the company to do their bit. My boss looked my effort over, gave it the imprimatur, and I hit the "send" button. Out went my patriotic message to 200 employees (most of whom, by the way, were younger than I, and I was 45 at the time.)

Now, in fairness to the under-35 crowd, this was a technology company I worked for, e.g. a company that employed software engineers. Well, software engineers ("propellor heads" in uncharitable parlance) are famous for knowing all about HTML, SQL Server, C++...and damned little else. That's why the company called its monthly high-tech pow-wows over pizza "Dork Nights." You could get one of these guys going for hours about Visual Basic, but ask one of them to find Washington, D.C. or London on a map and you might have a problem.

Still, imagine my shock when, moments after sending out this e-mail to the company, a reply e-mail popped into my in-box from one of the code-writing crowd.

"What happened on November 22, 1963?" The e-mail asked.

I fancy that I made a sound somewhat like air escaping from a bicycle tire.

The seminal event of my generation, the one of which everyone can remember exactly where he or she was and what they were doing when it happened, was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 11/22/63. And that goes for everyone, not just people who admired him. My parents were Republicans who voted for Nixon against Kennedy in 1960, but when I came home from school that day, they were in every bit as much a shocked daze as the most ardent of Kennedy partisans. The whole country was in standing-eight-count mode that day, which just goes to show how radically things have changed in the past 42 years.

But here was the first loud click-clack of the steel wheels on the steel rails carrying me and mine out to pasture...and to whatever lies beyond pasture: the sudden realization that, for those not yet born when it happened, the assassination of JFK is as remote in history as the assassination of William McKinley is to me. And by the way, the majority of Americans now alive were not yet born on November 22, 1963.

That was in 2001. Then there's the past year. When I was in college, I was part of a more-or-less trio of characters who hung out together whenever we all happened to be in town. We called ourselves "warriors of the arts." Charles Berigan, Jesus R. Araiza and myself. Charlie and "Ray," as he called himself in those days, had met in high school. I'd graduated ahead of both of them, but we formed what Ray's father jokingly called a "triumvirate:" Charlie was the pianist, Ray the composer, and I the poet. We were going to set the world on fire. A trash fire was about as far as we got, but that's beside the point.

We're all middle-aged guys now, and in the past 12 months, all three of us have lost our fathers. JRA's father died in January, 2005; mine died on September 27 of the same year, and Charlie lost his Dad in January, 2006. 12 months, three fathers. If I didn't feel the broom sweeping me toward Forest Lawn before, I sure as hell do now.

The late Leonard Bernstein remarked in one of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard that as we get older, the measure of our maturity is the degree to which we come to accept our mortality. When I was a child, and in my early teens, I used to stay awake at night worrying about death. Was there an afterlife? Or not? The idea of eternal oblivion gave me an ice-cold nausea that went right to the core. My parents weren't especially religious (well, my mother was into spiritualism and table-rapping, but I suspect that was because she was every bit as terrified of the blank and silent cosmos as I was) so I was never given the kind of religious grounding as a child that often spares children (if not adults) from this existential horror. Now that I'm well past Dante's Mezzo del cammino di nostra vita (I noted its passing on October 12th, 1990, my 35th birthday) I have found that the sheer noise of life, not to mention the multiplying of questions and answers that destroys youth, has taken the edge off the fear of death, if not banished it. I don't suppose anyone but the most zealous believer in a monotheistic god, or the calmest zen Buddhist, quietly determined to get off the wheel of karma, ever escapes the shadow of the fear of death entirely.

My ex-wife turned 60 this month. I sent birthday congratulations, and she e-mailed me back that she hadn't even really noticed the date, having been on vacation with her son and his girlfriend when it came around. She said she feels all right, but of course the round-number leaves her with the gnawing feeling that time is running out. Will she have 20 more years? 25? This much I know for certain: they will go quickly, however many she has. As will however many I have. I sometimes wonder how octogenarians deal with knowing how short their days are, but I'll find out soon enough myself, if I live that long. My own father died at 91, and in his last days seemed eager to get it over with.

My advice to my fellow baby-boomers: why don't we all quit trying to outwit old age by changing its name, having cosmetic surgery and clinging to the illusion that diet and exercise will somehow make death go away? I read recently about great strides that are expected in the next decades with regard to slowing down the aging process. Perhaps our great-great grandchildren will routinely live to be 140 years old. That just means they'll have to find something to do for an extra 50 or 60 years. And by the way, can you imagine how a 75 year-old whippersnapper will respond to tales about how hard life was for his 130-year-old father?

Back to the movies: George C. Scott as General George S. Patton, fielding questions from reporters while riding around on horseback. One of them asks him about the future of warfare. The next war, he says, is expected to be a push-button war. A push-button war? Patton darkly frowns. War in which nothing is proven, nothing affirmed? No heroes? No cowards? No generals? Only those who survive...and those who don't.

"I'm glad I won't live to see it," he said.

Say amen, somebody.