The dictionary definition of "old" is simple:  having lived for a long time; no longer young.  But as many of my friends here at MyBloggers will attest from personal experience, being "old" is not so simple.
I turn seventy in a few days.  It is for me more of a threshold than previous decade denoting milestones.  On this day, I become my grandfather, an event that causes me to shake my head in sheer wonderment at the fact that it has occurred at all.
When I was young, I always felt older than my chronological age.  Now that I am officially old, I feel younger than my age.  Perhaps memory has something to do with that.  It's all still there in my head, the life that I've lived, the good and bad things that I've done, the failures, the accomplishments, the entire passage of personal history strung out and available for reminiscence and review, reprise and regret.
I really have no regrets though.  There are things that I wish I hadn't done or said, but I'm not really regretful about it.  Remorse is a waste of time.  One cannot relive one's life.  Mulligans, as our friend Randy (Solitaire) can tell us, are only for golf (and the actor Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day"). 
After age seventy, said Jimmy Stewart, it's patch, patch, patch.  You realize you're old when you notice how young the doctors are.
So what am I going to do to celebrate turning 70?  I'm tempted to go wandering off into the beautiful, vast desolation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a bottle of single malt scotch stashed in my pack, and get gloriously drunk, what the cowboys used to call a "high lonesome."
But sanity rules.  I'm not senile yet.  My wife and I will visit Monument Valley this weekend as we head up to Arches National Park where, back in 2004, I had the sole religious experience of my life when I set eyes upon Balanced Rock.
Perhaps I'll have some photos to share upon my return.