"My signal light is not stuck; I'm going to make a turn eventually."

Sixty? Gadzooks, I'm as old as "Gone With the Wind" (the book and the movie). And that may be a good expression for what's happened to my hair, my waistline and my physical vigor. Not to mention teeth, hearing and eyesight. (I thought I told you not to mention teeth, hearing and eyesight!).

I'm not complaining. Reaching this age with even a few body parts intact is quite an achievement for someone who hasn't been particularly careful about diet, exercise, controlled stress or proper rest. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." But it's too late now to go back and eat all that spinach, run five miles every morning, practice transcendental meditation and sleep eight hours a night. When I consider those regimens seriously, I'm content to suffer the slings and arrows of benign neglect.

So what does 60 years mean? That long stretch of time encompasses 3,120 weeks, 21,915 days and 525,960 hours. That's a lot of hours, especially if you spend many of them waiting in doctors' offices. Fortunately, my time with doctors has been fairly limited, but I've been with a nurse about 280,320 hours. Yes, for more than half of my life, I've been married to my present - and incidentally - only wife, a registered nurse.

Before retiring a few years ago, I was employed by the same company for 306,600 hours - that's thirty-five years. Actually, I wasn't chained to my desk for all that time, only about 91,000 hours of it.

I figure I've slept about 131,490 hours, which sounds like a lot, but, hey, I still get sleepy. Lately, I've added in afternoon naps to try to catch up for all those hours I missed snoozing because of late social events, walking the floor with a sick baby, waiting for election returns to come in, reading everything from Mother Goose to "A Man in Full,' and watching really old movies on TV.

I've been a father for more than a quarter million hours - a lot of time for transporting a daughter to Girl Scout and 4-H meetings, listening to excuses about late nights and bad report cards, sending emergency funds to college campuses and waiting anxiously in hospital lounges for the births of three grandchildren. Now that I know how all that turned out, it was, as they say on the A&E Network, time well spent and I don't regret a second of it.

Conventional wisdom makes big deals out of turning 30, 40, 50 and 100. But somehow 60 is not considered a major turning point in the course of a lifetime. The attitude is mainly, "Sixty, so what?" It seems that after we pass 50, life becomes sort of a nondescript limbo unless we can make the long haul to the century mark.

As for me, I like the limbo - I just can't get very low anymore. But seriously, folks, life may not begin at 60, but it sure has some compensating moments. Even though the hours and days and years seem to fly by, they stop reflectively for a brilliant sunrise of pink and purple which lights the autumned mountains in pastel splendor. The rush of time pauses for a long afternoon with a six-year-old who likes to play "Hang the Man" and color in the crudely drawn images limned by a doting grandfather.

My walking partner for a late-life effort in semi-aerobic exercise has become fascinated with the concept of polychronic time - the idea that the continuum of existence is only artificially divided into seconds, minutes, hours and days. The philosophy is innate in primitive cultures: The past and the future do not really exist - only the present has meaning because the present is also both the past and the future. Using this way of thinking, you can dismiss regrets over past acts and anxiety about future events. Of course, you will probably never make it for a doctor's appointment on time and you might be eating lunch at midnight - all by your polychronic self.

I'm willing to compromise. I can be "monochronic" for dinner and polychronic for tomorrow's sunrise.

Doing 60 on the highway of life doesn't mean you can't enjoy the scenery. You just have to look, listen and learn more quickly.