Poultry, of a Vernal Nature.

Cripes, you guys. I'm no spring chicken. I still have my original teeth but I am old enough to be familiar with that expression about the henhouse. I am old enough to have seriously considered dodging the draft back during the days of gas wars. But I don't feel old, usually. It's just that every now and then the facts of the matter sneak up on a guy.

I have a new computer, a laptop with a wider screen than the ones I have outlived. I noticed today when I opened it up that the darkened screen reflects my image from my shoulders to my waist. That part of me doesn't look the same as it did back in the day when I used to tell the attendant to "give me a dollar's worth of regular." Some of us get thicker in the middle. Some of us get thinner on top. All of us get older--at least for a short time.

I am older than everybody who is playing on the field in the Major League Baseball Playoffs, including the umpires. I am older than the teachers who have my kids in their classes. I am invisible to young women. Alas, I must now come to grips with another abrupt reality: for the first I am about to cast my vote for a presidential candidate who is younger than me.

(The guy who I am not voting for is more years older than me than the guy who I am voting for is years younger than me. That guy is practically a dinosaur. They were the species that, according to his running mate, were running around five or six thousand years ago when even the earth was young. They had very small brains and became extinct. But, I digress).

Now, here's the good news: I like getting old. In almost every way getting older has led me to a better life, at least so far. Time has been a good friend to me. I owe it all to time. Everything I have. Every thing I am. Everything I will ever be.

Guys like me need a younger president. We need someone who is smarter than us, elite. We need someone who doesn't look at the world through such a small knothole as we do, someone who hasn't succumbed to cynicism, someone who hasn't given up on the idea of justice, someone who still knows the power of imagination.

Young people need this guy, too. They need him a lot more than we do. They need him more than they need us. They have so much time ahead of them. The last thing they need is an aging bullshitter who tries to scare them. Anybody who is 72 years old and still makes air quotation marks scares me.

That old guy has given a lot to this country. He deserves to spend some time fishing. It could make his life a lot better--and a lot of other lives,too.