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I am 65, and I think my brain just hopped a bullet train heading south, leaving a shadow of itself behind, just enough to let me worry whether it is time to close up shop, before the people in gray close it up for me. Will I know when I am an embarrassment? Do my younger colleagues, sometimes very much younger, already know? Am I missing the hints that they are sending my way? Will anyone show up for my retirement dinner? Will I? Will my memory still be good enough to recall everyone who did not show up, so that I can even up the score? And just how would I, feeble and without the wit, manage that? Will I be able to come up with their names, should I manage to recall their faces? And why am I consumed with fears about that dinner some five years before it will take place in exactly the same way I would lie awake at nights worrying about botching my bar mitzvah three years before I had to go on stage and man up in the Jewish way? But then once you, yes you, stop worrying about ridiculous things like this, you’ll have not only lost touch with the world, but with yourself.

What of my clearly decaying scholarly capacities? Of being unable to continue learning or, if able, then unable to retain what I have recently learned? I can’t even come up with words like “refrigerator” or “kitty litter” and must endure my wife’s hand gesture of irritated impatient contempt to “get on with it.” Can I ever get lost in a book again without my mind wandering? I have always been suspicious of those parents who claim that their dull normal and badly behaved children are really geniuses suffering from attention-deficit disorder and need to be dosed with Ritalin or given extra time on exams. But now it seems, in some kind of poetic justice, that I have ADD, the only difference being that I really have it. My doctor actually prescribed Ritalin for me, which, as it turned out, my health insurance refused to cover because I was over 18. Not willing to pay the unsubsidized price, my avarice, itself an attribute of old age, has kept me Ritalin free.

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