Here’s the crux of it, the poetry.

Here is the secret revealed: we are no more victims of old age than we were victims of childhood, adolescence or middle age.

Childhood: Look both ways, skinned knees, chicken pox, mother may I, don’t touch, don’t take, don’t ask, don’t eat and go to bed. “Now!”

Adolescence: Hormone-hell, menstrual cramps, pimples, braces, peer pressure, self-consciousness, do you think he likes me, what is everyone going to wear and I hate my hair.

Middle age: The gradually increasing hiss before the kettle shrieks: multi-tasking, divorce, carpools, send-a-kid-to-college, menopause, dry skin, where are my reading glasses, where’s my waist, I like it — it doesn’t like me, and I hate my hair.

And then, The Sixties; the Foyer of Old. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Reality stalls and for the next 10 years we pretend we are about the same age as our eldest child. But just because we might dress more like our daughters than like our mothers doesn’t make us younger than we are. Just because our new driver’s license photo doesn’t look that different from our last, doesn’t mean we haven’t become grandparents. Just because we watch reality TV, sign up for all kinds of classes, join travel clubs and wear jeans and T-shirts, doesn’t mean we are not a hop, skip and hobble from old.

The clues collect: the small signs of thickening and thinning, pain and paunch, the everyone-has-them distractions. The mirror is our hourglass. We lean close, stretching our cheeks up past our ears to measure the distance between Now and Then.

It’s a pastime of sorts — collecting ways to manipulate the changes we discover in ourselves. We tighten and stretch, diet, add highlights, fillers, slather our faces and necks with make-a-wish lotions, and recognize that we now have to write everything down to remember the who, why, where and when.

At first, none of these little intrusions seem to have much to do with how we perceive ourselves. But they soon will. We have begun that slow waltz that quietly dances us far outside the center of the universe. The saving grace is that with our simple lives becoming increasingly confusing, and the gradually apparent hormonal, mental and orthopedic shifts, we eventually do get it. We are old.

And in the commotion of it all, we begin to understand why we were told to look both ways, why what we eat really does matter, and why we can no longer take for granted everything we’ve spent our lives taking for granted.

Yet in the grand scope of things, maintaining is less fraught and confusing than becoming. Without intention, we have become the new generation of Old, and we have made being 70, 80, and yes, 90 look and feel rather impressive.

Old age: reverence, mellowing, early to bed, early to rise, acid reflux, arthritis, a lot of self-awareness, insight, authenticity, and — if we’re fortunate — a calming sense of gratitude and resolution.

CK Wolfson is a regular contributor to the Gazette.