Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995                   TAG: 9505310051
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AGE MAY BE CREEPING UP, BUT TAXES ON THE CAR SURE ARE LOW

You don't sit on the front porch smoking because that isn't done these days, and the neighbors would raise hell about passive smoke anyway.

Your face is not attractively lined by age. You have several chins, a wattle, a bump on your nose, and you get this really revolting red stuff on your chin if you don't shave every day. This means you'll never be able to look like Robert Edward Lee.

Kids don't come up asking for advice. You haven't been called out of retirement to save the company from ruin. The neighbors think you're peculiar, and they make fun of your car.

In addition to all of the above, you don't have a front porch with a good roof. You have a deck out back, and scritchy things with loathsome feelers fall off the trees and into your bourbon and water - which tends to make you drink more.

This is largely all right with me. I had never expected to be handsome in my old age because I was never that way when I was young - although I wasn't bothered with a red chin then.

As for kids and advice, I say let them find out about things the way I did - which was the hard way, pal.

As for my car, those people can laugh all they want to. That little 1978 jewel rusting away out there cost me just $11.37 in personal property taxes this year.

What I hadn't expected in these uncertain years is the mail you get from organizations that appear to be reasonably sure you won't be around when the work's all done this fall.

It's not easy going to the mailbox, expecting to find a check from an anonymous admirer, and finding instead a letter that says:

"For these three reasons, I urge you to apply for out supplemental cancer insurance today.''

Reason No. 1: "Chances are one in three you will get cancer."

It makes you want to run down to the convenience store and buy your first pack of Winston Light 100s since 1986.

There's another letter that says you're almost certain to be going to a nursing home some day and you really ought to have this insurance that has a 90-day deductible, whatever that is.

And you're eating your Cheerios and an insert advertising a funeral plan falls out of the paper.

That's the way it goes, all right.

And, bartender, I'll have another double, and give my little scritchy-thing buddy here the poison of his choice.