The poster child of this story on CNN.com today is Jack Borden, a 101-year-old attorney who practices fulltime in Weatherford, Texas. Retirement is the last thing on his mind. “I have to use a walker because of old age, so there's not much else I could do except sit in my house. Why do that when I can not only enjoy life, but help some people?" In Borden’s view, as in Bill and Ruth Stein’s,  limited mobility is a catalyst for staying on the job rather than a reason to take a load off.

"There is no brick wall." So speaketh the noted demographer and biogerontologist Jay Olshansky, referring to the fact that humans have no “death genes”, nor “aging genes” that regulate the process of making you old. He was speaking at the 2009 Age Boom Academy at the International Longevity Center, tp which director Bob Butler was kind enough to welcome me back as an alumna. Some other compelling facts from Olshansky’s talk, which was titled “The Demographic Perspective on Longevity”:

Yesterday, eminent composer Elliott Carter celebrated his birthday with a concert at Carnegie Hall.  It was also the premier of a 17-minute composition — and “not some chestnut written when he was a student in Paris in the 1930s,” as the front-page New York Times tribute pointed out. Carter wrote the piece last year, at 99, along with five others.

At 102, Ivy Bean has become the world’s oldest person on the social networking site. The New York Post’s “Weird but True” column published the news item, snarkily citing it as further proof “that Facebook has grown utterly uncool.” Gee, thousands of Facebook members disagree.

Renowned industrial designer Eva Zeisel is still at it at 101, despite macular degeneration that means she can only see bright objects, and only indistinctly. That hasn’t dimmed her sense of style: when I ask permission to take a photograph, she instructs me to move a pot of pink impatiens closer to pep up the background.

A New York Times magazine column by Jack Rosenthal tackles the search
for a generic term to describe the enormous cohort of Americans over 65 — or whenever it is that oldness begins.

Harry (Rick) Moody, a scholar on the subject of aging, describes the great majority as the wellderly. ”¦ But language has not yet caught up with life.

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