What's Not to Hate About Turning 66?

The beautiful actress Helen Mirren is almost 67!

This business about getting older each year is quite annoying. Mentally I stopped aging at about 27, but physically my given suit of armor continues to wear out, alerting me to the fact that it will someday cease operating altogether. It's nutty, and quite inappropriate if you ask me. My next birthday is less than a month away and I am not celebrating this one, that's for damn sure.

It's one thing to turn 65; that's a party! You are welcomed into Medicare, you get birthday cards from AARP, you get lots of jokey emails from friends about being old, over the hill, etc. But turning 66 is already nothing to laugh about. Nobody congratulates you for turning 66. They just whisper about it among themselves, somewhat surprised in my case since I still wear the same clothing I always wore, still puff the occasional pot pipe, still have all my brain cells, still cover the gray hair that's surely under there, and have not gotten morbidly obese. And despite listening to loud rock music in my car and sometimes hanging out with my son and his friends, who reportedly think I am "very cool for a mom," my body knows the truth and gives out every night, signalling bedtime if I can just drag it up the stairs and throw it onto the mattress like a sack of wet laundry. Good thing there's a bannister or else I'd have to sleep in the living room.

The thing is, were it not for the pain in my hip-- and all the other bones in my body--I'd think getting older is just fine: I know more about everything every day and care less about what others think of me, which is a heck of a good cocktail. And if I looked like Helen Mirren, I'd go gray too.