[dr_lew]

61 is not elderly.

I'll settle for "oldish".

[Ax]

I hit the big 7-0 last summer and still don’t consider myself “elderly.”

[AceMineral]

Mature.

[CrazyIvan]

Elderly vs oldish. Ugh! Is the glass of Gerital half empty or half full?

[Prospero]

61 is not even "oldish," and certainly not "elderly." He's definitely a elder, however, and that's enough for me.

The Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote a definitive non-romantic history of the Comanche peoples a few decades ago, and in it he illustrated the cultural collapse of those families in a single generation citing their treatment of their elders. Of course, the elderly among them were few and then anyone older than 35, probably.

When the jig was up, and the inevitable collision between an industrial and paleolithic order came to a foregone conclusion, the comparison he came up with is that of a deviant biker gang, one that regularly treated their elders like crap. That was his marker of a collapsed social order.

But East St. Louis has needed a high wall constructed around it for the past couple of decades.

[freepertoo]

61 is not “oldish” either.