Where have all the old people gone?

   Once they were visible everywhere.  They handed us our mail at the post office window; worked in the stores; sat in the barber shop, conversing with the barber while he cut their thinning hair and trimmed the more plentiful hair sprouting elsewhere on their balding heads;  the church held them in their pews, the women wearing hats,  often with  somewhat bedraggled mink fur pieces around their necks, and the men dressed in overcoats,  fedoras on the seat behind them.  The men hung out at the gas stations; the women sat on their porches, greeting those  who walked by with an invitation to sit and chat. Old people were all around us, though youth tends not to distinguish the decades after a certain age: old is old.
     The absence of old people came to my attention a number of years ago.  I was doing my usual civic duty, carrying petitions for potential candidates. That year we had been given a computer printout of the eligible voters in each district, Each copy of the printout had voter birthdates listed in a single column on the right. Scanning that list was an epiphany. In our district, very few citizens were born prior to 1945, and only a handful  in the decades before that.  To put it clearly, my generation was now the old people.  That's where they went.