How are you?

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune.

Why?

I’ve turned 80 and then some.

This is something I warn people about, although it’s too late for my fellow college classmates. My once-active physical life has eroded like a rain-soaked hill. If I got on a bike, I’d fall off. Tennis, pickleball, bowling, race-walking (except in slow motion) — poof! I’m left with trudging along, performing deep-water aerobics, and playing nine holes of golf out of a cart. All this and bad balance. In short, this train got the disappearing railroad blues.

What is this, a pity party? Are you in a muttering retreat somewhere? C’mon, man, you have a lot to be happy about.

I guess you’re right. As Casey Stengel said when he turned 70, “Most people my age are dead.”

At 82 I can say the same thing today. Taking nothing for granted, I can cook (my one dish), sleep well, eat well, drive, travel. Many if not most people my age don’t have all those luxuries.

Lacking much of a physical life, I’ve increased working on my mind, or what’s left of it.

Ah, ah, ah!

O.K. I play, teach and write about bridge endlessly. Reading is a great companion: I’ve memorized words, phrases and passages from literature and popular culture, some of which you’re reading here without attribution.

Friends and family continue to be a blessing. Meeting Brooks Robards, my companion for 40 years and wife of 38, is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. What can I say? She’s a redhead. My beloved sons Benjamin and Matthew are happily practicing law and teaching math, respectively. They have great wives and kids, and in Matthew’s case, also great stepsons.

We make wonderful side trips to see Brooks’s kids and their families in Calgary, Alberta, where Kristy is a professor of psychology; in Marlboro, Vermont; where Erik is a sound technician; and in New York City, where Joel is a partner at an executive-search company (“A high-end job in a low-end business,” he wisecracks).

O, brave new world, / That has such people in it!

Anything else you’re doing?

Looking forward to making new friends on the Island, I’m constantly reaching out. The reaction is invariably positive.

Any legitimate complaints?

Well, I’ve substantially lost that writerly feeling (other than my bridge column for the Gazette), although this essay might be the start of something new. I will be the pattern of all patience.

In the meantime, back to aging: “You walk like an old man,” my wife says. To which I reply, “I AM an old man.”

But you think and act like a younger man.

That is my fast intent.

Jim Kaplan is the Gazette’s bridge columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].