“Grandma, Baba’s an old man!” Rosie tells me after a brief audience with the eminence grise who is my husband. 

“Well, that must mean I’m an old woman!” I say. 

“No!” she retorts. Rosie is 3. 

“What does ‘old’ mean?” I ask her.

She doesn’t know. And neither do I. But we’re learning. I noticed that Baba was making himself scarce when Rosie was visiting. Maybe it’s his hearing, which is shot, I thought. Then I asked him one day, when we were driving to physical therapy, which is where you go when you don’t go to the gym anymore. He said he didn’t want her to see him as an old man. 

He’s thinking about his legacy, I thought. But she doesn’t know what old is, I told him. She knows you and loves you however you are. That’s all she knows. Not like me, who remembers how strong your arms were, how trim and tough your physique, now thin as a rail. 

He never did go to the gym. He walked through Tribeca to the Lower East Side, where his bar was, picked up the money and walked to the bank, where all the tellers knew him. Then he walked his dog. He never tried to stay young; never expected to grow old.

He can still talk your ear off as he recalls barely believable but true stories of coincidences of his past. If he didn’t have proof of all the world leaders and celebrities he interviewed, you might not believe him. His profile, microphone in hand, on the front page of The Daily News, talking to Bobby Kennedy (the good one), with a headline about Muhammad Ali, still called Cassius Clay, another one of his interviewees.

He still writes hundreds of words a day on his laptop, either editing or writing new work. I implore him to publish, even self-publish, or use one of the many online outlets for his work, but he just wants to write now. Maybe a book will magically appear. Maybe his wife will put aside her own life-work and bring his books into being. Better get a better wife than me, I think.

I remember when our neighbor Ed Kraus got old. One day he was tromping the roads on foot to meet up with his pals in town. The next day, it seemed, he was using a cane to get to the bench by the river with Doreen, a few hundred feet from their home. “What happened?” I asked him. “I got old!” he exclaimed. It surprised us both.

The health care proxy papers are in my laptop case, waiting to be signed. We don’t have DNRs yet. It’s hard to face the realities of getting old. We are all in, theoretically. But a theoretical proxy won’t hold much weight in the end. You can’t count on a number to tell you when you’re old. It creeps up on you like a tiger in the jungle, waiting to pounce. Then, when we are least able to fight back, it attacks. Bones break, muscles atrophy, organs give up. If we’re lucky, our minds get to see it all happening. If we’re not, well, that may be a blessing.

Birthdays remind us, if we don’t already know, how old we are. Mine is coming up. May is a beautiful month to have a birthday. Lilacs bloom, the redbud tree flashes its magenta limbs, that spring green is everywhere. The shad rush upriver to spawn. We will eat cake, blow out candles, celebrate being alive.