In a while I heard two female voices up front; the manager was back. "A man is waiting to ask you about a CD," the young thing said brightly. "It's that old gentleman back there."

Well, I bridled for a moment-mind you, I was only in my mid-fifties then. But I shrugged it off. The girl was just a teen and hardly a judge of age. To her I was one of the elderly, a group which she probably saw extending down to age forty. I bought my CD from the manager (not much older than the clerk) and went off to calm my spirits with a deli lunch.

The more recent incident, as I say, was worse. Much worse. It happened last month in Boston with Anne and some friends. We'd boarded a crowded MTA train and got separated in the packed cars. I was riding happily along underground, half watching for that poor man in the folk song who "rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston." The subway bumped and jounced, squealed gratifyingly on the curves, and finally surfaced into bright sunshine as we got near the Boston Museum.

The ride had me feeling great. I loved swaying along, hanging onto a strap in the crowded aisle. But two stops from the Museum, as still more people pressed on, I heard a voice from my right. An attractive woman in her forties was smiling up at me from her seat. It was a warm, sympathetic smile. She stood. She spoke.

"Here, sir, you take my seat." I think my mouth must have dropped open. Was this woman truly talking to me? Now she stepped aside and gestured to the empty seat. And, having really no choice, I mumbled "Thank you" and sat down. The train lurched into motion again. I felt-what?-subdued, unmanned, suddenly old, I took off my "Fly Creek" baseball cap and set it on my knee.

I was still so shaken when we reached the Museum stop that I just stood and headed for the door. On the platform, rejoining the others, I realized my cap was gone-was back on the floor of the train. Too late. The train was pulling out. As we left the Museum several hours later, I bought a new cap and came home advertising, not Fly Creek, but the Museum of Fine Art.

Now, why was I shocked, shaken? After all, I am sixty-seven, wrinkled, gray-haired, balding. That middle-aged lady had spotted all that and made a gracious gesture. It was a gesture I've made on public transport all my life, offering a seat to an old person.

But that was it! I hadn't been feeling like a senior citizen. The MTA had carried back to the '60's, had me humming, "Oh, he never returned, no he never returned..." For the moment I'd been garbed again in tie-died shirt and bell-bottoms, with a mop of black hair like an apprentice Beatle. Good days, those! But then that kind woman had wrenched me out of fantasy, plopped me back in my present self. Didn't feel good, that. Didn't want to be an aging man again. But the MTA folk song was gone, snatched away. Now I was sadly thinking of Robert Burns' couplet: "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!"

That kind lady had seen an aging man. But there you are: I don't see myself that way. Of course I confront the confirming evidence on a daily basis; there's a geezer lurking in my bathroom mirror each morning. And it's a geezer's knees that slow me down on steps, and a geezer's back that I have to guard when I lift feedbags or hay bales. The evidence is there, but I'd sooner ignore it.

The trek toward self-knowledge, toward self-acceptance, is a lifelong one; and you'd think that advancing age would bring signs of ground gained. But here I am, heading toward three score and ten, and still unwilling to accept the geezer in the mirror. Hey, I'd better face it. I'm now a guy to whom younger people will offer their seats.

I'd do well to do some more repeating to myself-this time from Yeats: "An aging man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick..." Grim words those, until you add the next ones: "unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress..."

All right, I'll clap and keep on singing. And I'll take real delight that some kid in Boston is sporting a baseball cap that proclaims, "Fly Creek." I wonder what his friends make of it.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.