"I'm so glad," he said, "there's no more need to be young -- especially at my age. I've finally reached a stage in life where I know the rules. As a child I felt embarrassed about not being an adult. In adolescence I tried to hold onto childhood, and did for as long as I could; and so being an adolescent had to wait until I should have started being an adult. I began adulthood somewhere around thirty, and maybe later, but people my age had by then started wanting to be young instead. So, while we were the same age we were never contemporaries. Finally, I've arrived at what I'd been growing toward. I've become old, and I'm good at it."
I asked if he wouldn't want to be a different age, knowing what he had learned.
"No, sonny. It takes a lifetime to learn you've had a lifetime of learning. I don't look back, and seldom look forward. Instead, I've settled. I'm old, and doing very well."
Was it all right, I asked, that he was coming to the end.
"Where else should it come to? Things start, they happen, they end. Lives too are that way. I'm not glad to end. I'm not sad. I'm just doing what it's time for."
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