Over the past few years, I’ve really begun to feel age. I feel it in my left eye, which sometimes leaks spontaneously—I swipe at it with the back of my wrist and people take me to be weeping. I feel it in my new habit of swinging both legs out of the car at the same time, apparently in unconscious response to a directive from the part of my brain that monitors muscle strength and balance. Having risen to my feet, I feel it in an embarrassing arthritic hobble that takes me 10 seconds to walk off, hoping all the while that other parking lot crossers aren’t noticing, though several of them seem to be suffering from the same condition, or worse.

I hasten to add that though my muscles may be weakening and my joints stiffening, I’m not infirm. I’m as vigorous as I ever was, and reasonably healthy. Mentally, I’m quite intact, though my memory, always bad, grows worse. People tell me I seem younger than my years.

But as I say, I’m feeling age. I feel it in my invisibility to strangers. I haven’t been nubile for many years, and never got many glances when I was. I didn’t mind that, or told myself I didn’t. I saw my ordinary looks as protective coloration, a duck blind behind which I could comfortably observe and take my shots. But I’m not at all sure I like this new kind of anonymity, which is an absolute dismissal. Even in contextualized situations like readings and receptions, eyes slide past me; internal shutters fail to click.

When I was 30, I felt sure that a paradoxical reward awaited me at 60, if I made it that far. Having never had any beauty to lose, I reasoned, I’d be exempted from mourning its loss. But as I’ve grown older, this proposition has turned inside out. I see now that I did have at least some beauty—not much, but some—and exactly because I had so little, I could hardly afford to lose it. Now, at this inconvenient moment, I realize that I do care