FOUNTAINS OF YOUTH!

This age thing -- it never much occurs to us until it's begun to pile up on us....!

Aristotle, who always said smart things, said about youth: "Youth is easily deceived, because it is quick to hope." Several thousand years and miles later, Lincoln said: "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." A beautiful friend of mine summed it all up this way: "Youth is really not wasted on the young."

I leave it to the reader to choose. Or not. Because maybe youth is more to be lived than defined. The only snag to that is just about the time you've learned how to live it, you've begun to lose it. Ahhh, but John Updike to the rescue. He insists -- and proves it in his meticulous writing -- that our most vividly powerful memories are of what took place in our first 20 years of life.

Now if he's right -- and I'd bet my keyboard on it! -- this means no matter how old we grow in body or mind, there is this exquisite repository of remembrances from which we can withdraw. In the flash of a wish. Like coffee is a pick-me-up in the morning, drinks and drugs a rush in the night, distilling those 20 years can be a high without the crash. A 4-star movie without the price of admission. Maybe even some of the psychic fulfilment's Freud promised without the couch.

The only problem with these repositories, say in Proust's classic "Remembrances of Things Past," is so many of its chapters are marred with small hurts and large failures. True enough in anyone's book. And yet, when we read look-backs like Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" or Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again," closing the book we remember mostly the victories. Victories replicable in anyone's life.

This in no way damns our prestigious pharmaceutical industry, and its rejuvenating pills and potions. But then, who needs an industry when we have those first fresh 20 years....?