Jan 26, 2024 4 min read

The letters arrive in the mail most every day now, hand-addressed envelopes that appear to hold a personal letter, but no. They are unsolicited mail from businesses reaching out to remind me of the birthday that’s lurking out there like a doorway to a mysterious, confusing new world.

Come May 7, I will turn 65, and how the heck did that happen? The AARP stuff that jams my mailbox tells me the next few years will bring an avalanche of 65th birthdays, all celebrated by those of us whose parents were young and feeling prosperous enough in those last years of the ’50s and first years of the ’60s to keep having kids.

Much of the mail is from Medicare brokers who’ve found my name and address on some list or other. Could it be voter rosters? Or maybe they find old high school yearbooks from 1977, do the math, and start Googling. Whatever, these insurance sellers have my number.

Until those reminders, I didn’t think much about 65, instead living under that comfy rock of oblivion that – I’m not kidding – caused me to occasionally do math to calculate how old I am. Worse, some of that same subtraction handed me the realization that my first-born will soon be turning 29. Twenty-nine! Again, how the heck?

So it’s time to think about Social Security and Medicare, two names that were always just background noise. Checking into the SS site, I learned how much all those years of working (and the vast empty space that coincided with years spent at home with my kids) would add up to in a monthly government check. But that’s tricky, and it’s not really fair: I’m being asked to predict how long I’m sticking around, not just at my current job but in the big, unknowable general stick-around. Do I grab it all now, or wait and get a bit more?

To answer the first: I like my job every day and love it many days. I am in good health and still have the creative steam to keep going past 65. To answer the second question: people in my family live a long time, but who can say?

Sixty-five is younger now than it used to be. I have photos of my grandparents and other relatives when they were not yet 65 – probably in their mid-50s. The women look and dress the way that age used to look: gray curled hair, aprons over cotton dresses, square purses in the crooks of their elbows. Oh, and sturdy, sensible shoes. But that, I understand. Sixty-five is hard on the feet.

I remember the shock of turning 50, (a milestone that hit me even harder than 40 did, which at the time felt like I’d been launched over the transom into real adulthood.) But when I turned 50, my kids were pre-teens; I told myself that in order for them to grow up, I had to get older. It was a strange bit of self-comforting that eased the transition. It’s also the time around when the gray hair started showing up.

The Medicare letters say I don’t have to do anything about signing on right now, not if I plan to continue working full time, and that’s what I want to do – for now anyway. I’ll go to the mailbox today and, sure enough, there will be a letter from somebody who wants to talk to me about Medicare.

I won’t open it. But I won’t throw it away, either. I’ll add it to the stack on the corner of my desk, deflecting and maybe denying 65 for a little while longer. But May 7 will come anyway.