Old is a complicated adjective, a comparative form masquerading as a positive. It really means “older than.” Age 74, am I old? Older than I was, older than most, but not as old as might be, still capable in some regards if not in others. To my kids and grandkids old, to older friends still young.

To declare myself old solves several problems. It suggests I’m a realist, looking facts in the face, exonerating me of any attempt to “seem young.” Seeming young is a pathetic American fixation. The fortunes we spend denying the undeniable, fooling nobody. Why the fear? What dreadful penalties do we expect for looking our age? My modest goal is to look “OK for 74,” a less stressful ambition. (I still have a ways to go.)

Presenting myself as old makes my present vigor and capabilities laudable, not sadly less. Sure, I’m old but not that old. It also entitles me to the deference decency accords seniors. I am pleased, not miffed, when someone younger offers me their seat on a subway.

Being old relieves me of responsibility for current conditions, which these days is a relief. My mental and physical incapacity, when they come, will inconvenience few. In America’s present gerontocracy, decrepit oldsters teeter into feeble or demented decisions, insisting they’re on the ball and at the top of their game. I mean, really!

The relief is moral, no less than practical. “The content of the old is much greater than their discontent,” writes Virginia Woolf,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedpartly because they are for the most part irresponsible; and partly because they do not look ahead but into the past and into the present… Until we reach that age, those of us who are not moralists by profession have not made up our minds about our own lives, let alone the lives of other people. After that age we become, if we have a turn for thinking at all, full of concern for the soul. We lose the sense of separateness from others, and it becomes of great moment to us that people should understand the value of goodness.

This is not true for all, of course – some oldsters gnarl into bitterness and resentment – but it happened to me, more daily, a gladness in being and reluctance to beat myself up. Insensibly, I graduated from self-rebuke to self-acceptance. Distance dwindled grievous disappointments into innocent, even amusing, incidents, in a typical tale of ups and downs. No life is perfect. Even those I reviled I now forgive because who we are isn’t really our fault.

To extol age may seem, to younger observers, to protest too much, making lemonade out of lemons. Who wouldn’t prefer to be younger! Not me. Plenty of my years I wouldn’t want to repeat but I prize the education they brought. Young again, I’d have to endure the doubts and aches of age, the burden of expectation, the prospect of inevitable mistakes. I wouldn’t have grandkids to delight me or my years with Jane. Yes, I’d love to play tennis again, but at the cost of these missives, which serve me, as tennis did, as a way to make friends.

Above all, I would not enjoy the freedom of antiquity, to be myself and think as I please. Old, one can hardly be blamed for one’s thoughts because, no worries, the old guy is losing it. I no longer need to keep up appearances. No one can blanch, “You can’t say that!” Why not, I shrug, if it’s true?

Death, too, has lost its sting. It is pleasant to live but at end of day, tired, it is pleasant to yawn and slip to sleep.