Some idiot told me that 60 was the new 40, but I'm not believing it.

I remember being 40, and it was nothing like this. Forty was actually a pretty crummy year. I spent half the year sleeping on a mattress in a friend's office, I had a brief relationship that ended with one of the great mysteries of my life and I came this close to being totally flattened by an 18-wheeler on Interstate 5.

Sixty has got to be better than that.

Yeah, I turn 60 today and I actually feel better about it than I have about most of the other "zero" birthdays in my life, although I can't think of too much that was wrong when I turned 10 other than being pre-pubescent. My 20th birthday saw me about to flunk out of school, my 30th birthday saw my first marriage circling the drain and we've already talked about 40.

Fifty wasn't terrible, but I was under increasing stress at work as our newspaper had been sold to the guy who would eventually run it into the ground. Compared to that, 60 is a breeze. For one thing, when you're unemployed at 30, 40 or 50, you're kind of a bum. At 60 you get to call it early retirement, especially when you have a wife who's an extremely high achiever.

[caption id="attachment_180" align="alignleft" width="180" caption="Maddie and me"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-180" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/maddie-and-me-180x300.jpg" alt="Maddie and me" width="180" height="300" />[/caption]

For another thing, there's this baby.

I'm absolutely crazy about both my kids, but I didn't meet them until Pauline was 12 and Virgile was 7. I was in prison and they were both conceived on conjugal visits.

<em>Editor's note: They were not.</em>

No, but I thought it made me sound a little more edgy than I really am. I missed out on my children's early years because technically I'm a stepfather. But with this one, little Madison Nicole, I was in on it almost from the beginning. Thanks to my thoughtful son-in-law, I was on the phone listening to her crying in Beijing when she was 5 minutes old.

When she was 10 days old, I was in Beijing too and she slept on my chest for an hour. It was one of the most wonderful hours of my life.

I've seen her quite a bit since then, especially considering her parents are in the foreign service. And I'll be seeing her in two weeks for Christmas in Washington, D.C. My friend Mick, who is three years younger than I am (but looks older), teases me by calling me "Gramps," but he doesn't know it's one of the most wonderful roles I've played in my life, along with Dad and the love of my wife's life.

Sixty? To me 60 was Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life" or the guy in the top hat in the Monopoly game. Sixty was somebody who ought to be a grandfather and would probably be counting the weeks till retirement. I'm cool with that, although I'll still keep writing. The nicest thing about being retired -- even if it was involuntarily -- is that now the only person who gets to tell me what to do is my wife.

Sixty doesn't sound as old as it used to be, but that's mostly because the person who was 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 is still rattling around somewhere inside of me.

Now 70, <em>that</em> sounds old.

Check back with me in 2019 and I'll let you know if I was right.