I've just read a very cynical, but somehow comforting article in the April 7th New Yorker about babyboomers and aging. At least someone is tackling this huge elephant in the Health Club.

The starting point for Michael Kinsley's essay is age 60, which I am, newly. He makes the point that our generation will no doubt work on competitively aging (The title is something like: Mine is Longer Than Yours: The last boomer game.) This irks him no end, especially since he has Parkinson's disease, a condition which will not foreshorten his life, but does put him in a category of someone unlucky enough to have already been written off.

Kinsley speaks of in invisible dividing line between those babyboomers who are still on the ascendency, and those who know they have already peaked and are THOUGHT to be on the decline, either physically, occupationally, or financially. A depressing thought this , especially for someone like me who is hoping to have a really brand new career or two before I kick the bucket.

What Kinsley doesn't mention is that we babyboomers are, in part, following in the large footsteps of our parents, some of whom do not consider themselves old, even in their eighties, despite bad disease.

My mother mentions this morning that she and my father saw a 'very depressing' show on PBS last night called, 'Caring For Your Parents.' This was brave on their part, since my father nearly succumbed from cancer treatment, and I spent many weeks in Florida caring for them while he was in the ICU.

(Note: I was more cowardly, preferring to tape it than watch something I knew would be depressing from the reviews in the paper. The main protagonists in this little documentary were mainly devoted daughters, of various means, and the parents were frail elderly.)

"It was depressing because I don't want to get that way." What the solution, I asked her. "These old people should move to places like where your Dad and I live, in The Villages. That's the only solution." I might mention right here that my father will be 88 in a few weeks, and my mother is 85.

So, I gently ask her, what should happen when these Villages people get really old and need care. This is a better question than, 'What the hell is going to happen when you or Dad are really feeble?'

My parents have their own game. Each is convinced he/she will outlive the other. "Just put me on a float," my mother said from their home in land-locked Central Florida.

Then she chuckled, and I laughed, and we both giggled at the thought of daily funeral pyres on the water hazards of each of their many golf courses. "Right," I said. " You get two penalty shots if you go into the water. One for the water, the other for disturbing the body."