I've been teased before that I'm a 70-year-old man trapped inside a 21-year-old's body. The sick thing is, I truly can't wait to be an old guy.

Now I'm not rushing to get in line for saggy skin, achy joints and an AARP card, but the wisdom and simplicity and often outrageous antics of our sexagenarians and up is something I strive to one day achieve.

This Sunday, I attended the Senior Citizen Prom in the AMU Ballrooms and had an absolute blast. I danced like a fool, laughed with the guests and felt, strangely enough, like a kid again.

My neighborhood was somewhat lacking in younger families while I was growing up, and I was very close with my grandparents, so I spent much of my childhood with people that were exponentially older than me. Most of them had known my family for decades, and many were immigrants like my grandparents. They had stories of growing up in the old country and in the old neighborhoods. They were always broke and their house was flooded with kids all the time, some of whom were their own. I found out about all the mischief my parents and their friends got into, and used it as leverage when they caught me making some of my own.

As a senior in high school, I took a course that let me leave campus for two periods to do community service. Of course, I chose a nursing home as my site, where my duties consisted of wheeling cantankerously entertaining seniors outdoors to enjoy their cigarettes and sitting mesmerized by their stories. All of them were characters.

There was Jimmy Johnson, the former golden glove boxer and Vietnam Veteran who had a stroke and now said everything about 50 times faster than the human ear can decipher. Sweet and slightly senile Roosevelt, who danced to modern R&B with the nurses assistants. Howard, who couldn't speak except to count to fifteen repeatedly and could do 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzles in a week. Rose, one of my favorite residents, was an Italian widow who had a mouth like a sailor and a temper not to be toyed with. She had to be sent away for a few weeks because she tried to kill a 99-year-old man with a broken tea saucer because she thought he was coming on to her.

There's this misconception that as we age we get boring and that we are somehow less in touch with ourselves and the world around us. Now getting a job and paying a mortgage and raising a family, that can make a person boring, but the golden years after our retirement are when we finally get to be who we've built ourselves up to be. There's no law, political or natural, that says we can't still wreak a little havoc now and then just for fun.

A coworker of mine told me her father is in a nursing home. He is in a wheelchair and wears a blanket across his lap. After he'd been there a few months, his family noticed on their visits that he had made friends — REALLY good friends — with another woman. She would sit in her wheelchair next to his, and rest her hand on his lap — underneath the blanket.

The family was embarrassed and decided to just let it be. But a few months later, he'd made a new lady friend who would also rest her hand on their father's, um, lap. Wheeling him back to his room one day, my coworker asked her father, "Dad, I noticed you've met someone else. What does this new woman have that the old before didn't?"

He looked up at his daughter, gave a sly smirk and said, "Parkinson's."

Truly, youth is wasted on the young.