Age 67.

I remember looking around the salon on a Friday morning at the elderly women getting their weekly wash and set. The stylists wound the short gray, white and silver hair in tight little perm rollers, then walked the customers to the dryers. It didn’t take long for their thinning hair to dry. Then it was back to the stylists’ chairs to get their hair brushed out, teased and heavily sprayed.

Wrinkles and jowls define their faces and necks. Most wear bifocals, orthopedic shoes and old lady clothes. I wondered, will I look like that some day? How long can I stave off the appearance of age?

I try to imagine what they looked like at age 30 or 40, perhaps with long brunette curls, floral dresses, high heels and firm skin. At what point did they decide to cut their hair and get it washed and set every week?

In Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin,” the narrator is an aging woman, Iris, with a lot to say about getting old. As she prepares to attend a graduation ceremony where her dead sister was to be honored:

“Getting my clothes on helped. I am not at my best without scaffolding. (Yet what has become of my real clothes? Surely these shapeless pastels and orthopedic shoes belong on someone else. But they’re mine; worse, they suit me now.)”

As she waits on the stage:

“They barely glanced at me. To them I must have seemed quaint, but I suppose it’s everyone’s fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.”

Quaint. Spry. Cute. Golden.

I will never join anything that’s called Golden. Please.

A few days later:

“When I look in the mirror I see an old woman; or not old, because nobody is allowed to be old any more. Older, then. Sometimes I see an older woman who might look like the grandmother I never knew, or like my own mother, if she’d managed to reach this age. But sometimes I see instead the young girl’s face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face, which seems — especially in the afternoons, with the light on a slant — so loose and transparent I could peel it off like a stocking.”

I understand now why older women like to talk about how they used to look. Inside, I am still the shapely woman who got catcalls when I walked down the street. Sometimes I am surprised when I don’t. Talk about denial.

As a friend once said about his birthday, “I feel like a 37-year-old trapped in a 60-year-old body.”

Aging seems like a cruel joke. Maybe that’s why my mother stayed away from mirrors. As long as you don’t see what you look like, you can still be 37.

The husband said the other day that a friend he hadn’t seen for awhile was looking old. Then, “I probably do, too.”

My bucket list? What seemed so possible 20 years ago now seems unattainable: get that graduate degree at a school on the West Coast, live in various foreign countries — New Zealand, India, France — for several years each, learn collage, write a real book, finish a Victorian crazy quilt, criss-cross the U.S. on back roads in a convertible … It goes on and on.

I’ve not let all of these things go just yet.

At the beauty salon, there was one exception to all the tightly-curled matrons. One older woman — I saw her once — came in for a trim. She has long gray hair. She wears jeans and hiking shoes.

I think I’ll be more like her.