“Old age,” said Louis Kronenberger, “is an excellent time for outrage. My goal,” he said, “is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.”

I’m not into outrage myself, but I know what Konenberger means. I am into poking the bear in the eye sometimes and waiting for their screams.

I am intrigued by the idea of being iconoclastic, someone who irritates people or stirs them up by challenging cherished ideas and institutions, conventional wisdom. I set out to make people think and laugh before the concept of humor sinks and drowns beneath the news.

Love is controversial.

I seem to irritate people without even trying, and sometimes because I am trying.

Age has freed me from worrying about what other people think. This appears to stun and even enrage the people eager to tell me what to think.

I can worry about what people think or choose not to care what people think. I can prattle on the things I can’t do anymore, or I can do some things I have never done before. I’ve never been so accessible. I suppose it’s a writer’s dream.

One of the curious things about blogging is that when I make a mistake, a score of people will descend, often indignantly, to correct me. But I can write a 2,000-word essay on something of great importance to me, and none of those people will say a single word about it. There is something in people that loves to correct other people but doesn’t love to read, another of the anthropological things you learn when you put your work out in the ether.

The latest mistake occurred when I stayed up too long to write about Cindy the Goat Lady the other day, and I confused lambs with kids in my sometimes unsound mind. I heard about it all day, and none of the people who rushed to correct me had a word to say about Cindy and her remarkable goats and life.

Some posts sought to be helpful; some were pompous and jeering. When I read these messages, I get this magical feeling that I am growing more extensive, and the people who correct me are shrinking before my eyes. I try to imagine spending my time correcting the mistakes of people I don’t know.

I can’t do it. Those are not the shoes of other people I can stand in.

Tomorrow I will get a whole bunch of messages from angry hens clucking about my writing this and daring not to care or feel sorry about my mistake. But I’m not playing the game or following the rules, as usual. My age is the reason for that.

Dominic said this mistake was a big deal and implied I should be ashamed of myself for not getting it right.

My first boss as a journalist said the same thing to me that Dominic did; he died when a truck ran over him while he was chasing a prostitute down the street while drunk.

I never knew what to make of that.

I guess the script calls for me to be ashamed and chastened and apologize. But I’ve never been good at following the script.

I don’t care. It’s not what I choose to worry about, given so many other choices, and lo and beh,ld; it’s my choice. I am free now, like breathing the freshest air.

The importance of this isn’t what you might think. I make mistakes all the time and will make more. It’s a signature trait of mine. It gives many people pleasure and work. They don’t seem busy unless they spend all of their time correcting mistakes.

The kids and their mommies and daddies didn’t seem to mind.

The goat mistake was a dozen posts ago; I don’t even remember writing it. I’m still getting messages about it, though, days later.

For me, the future is the sweetest part of getting older because I can choose what I want to think and what I want to worry about, and what I don’t want to worry about. That, I am coming to understand, makes me an iconoclast; I’m ignoring cherished beliefs, and day by day, I’m seeing how this fits me.

At my age, the future must be grasped with enthusiasm and determination. As the big clock goes down, things get more intense every day – the clock does not ever tick upwards.

Most people live with the conviction that anything they can’t do now, they can do later. As I turn 75 (60 seems young), I am coming nose to nose with mortality. There is an end to time. The future means something new and something different. Life is what I make of it.

But with that comes the freedom to decide what I will fill my time with. For me, it’s not about arguing, apologizing, second-guessing, or resentment.

Joan Chittister writes eloquently about a new state of mind simmering to come up in me and live.

“There is a sense of urgency that comes with the awareness of time,” she writes, “the thought that there is so much else to live that I have known until now. There is so much air out there that I have not allowed myself to breathe. There is the rest of my life to be lived that I have been denied until now, ignored till now, unaware of until now. Like every other age of life, old age is a learning time. It may be here that we learn best what life – mine and yours – is really about.”

Amen.