Rusty Saber: How to know when you're getting old

If life begins at 40, why do so many people think they are over the hill when they turn 40?

I guess they think 40 is midway through life, not the beginning point. I read recently that as people get older, they visualize themselves as being younger than they actually are. I know I still wonder what I'll be when I grow up.

The youthful mental self-image of ourselves is fine until it is contradicted by photos we see of ourselves. Of course, we can resolve the pesky dilemma of that old-looking face glaring at us from a photograph by condemning the camera and/or photographer for fabricating an obviously erroneous image.

Truth be told, many people simply don't know when they are getting old. I can't speak for women, but for men, there are ways to know. Aging clues for women may be similar, however. For men, at least, here is the Rusty Saber to the rescue.

How do you know when you are getting old? You know you're getting old when:

You qualify for senior citizen discounts and you get them without ever having to ask for them;

You are talking to people about the Good Old Days; they talk about when Jimmy Carter was president and you talk about when Harry Truman was president;

It isn't just young girls who call you "sir"; middle-aged women now do it;

You can remember when homes didn't have refrigerators; the iceman delivered ice for your icebox and the milkman left milk on your front porch;

You see the movie actress you once believed to be the sexiest woman alive in a TV drama playing a lady whose children force her to enter a nursing home;

You read that the singer of romantic ballads you loved when you were in high school is celebrating his 95th birthday;

You send your high school sweetheart a card congratulating her on the birth of her first great- grandchild;

No one around you remembers the name of the baseball player who was your childhood idol;

You listen to a Golden Oldie radio station and the music it plays is the stuff you hated when your children were in high school; you realize your Golden Oldies go way, way back, perhaps Platinum Oldies;

You not only cannot cut the mustard anymore, you don't even remember how you did it nor what you did with the knife you used to cut it;

Your favorite two-fisted action movie hero has such severe arthritis in his hands that he can no longer make a fist;

You watch one of your all-time favorite movies on a classic cable TV movie channel when it hits you between the eyes: All of the leading cast members are now dead;

You forget something important. When you finally remember what it is, you forget why it was important for you to remember it;

You have long since given up fretting about bad hair days, now you would give a lot to just have some hair to fret about;

You remember when adults and children could go to the same movies, and you remember when it wasn't necessary to take out a bank loan before going to a movie concession stand;

remember when political correctness meant that you voted for the correct political candidates, the winners;

You have been married so long that you and your spouse finish each others' sentences ... accurately;

You remember when famed athlete Jim Thorpe was named, ahead of Babe Ruth, as the Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the 20th Century, therefore, you are old enough to ask why Babe Ruth was ranked ahead of Thorpe in the greatest athlete contest at the end of the century. Since both were dead by 1950, you are old enough to wonder what Ruth did to pass Thorpe in 2000;

You attend your high school class reunion and you can't believe all these old people are the same age as you ... there must be some terrible mistake!

Are you getting old? I don't know about you, but I'm not getting old, I'm still waiting to see what I'll be when I grow up.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)