A friend sent me a copy of a book by a gifted aging comedy writer named Daniel Klein. At age 73, his dentist told him he would need implants for many of his front teeth because of gum troubles.

The extractions and implants would take more than a year and cost thousands of dollars.

Klein decided that rather than agree to the dental work, he would instead head off to the Greek islands in the Aegean for a year or two and write a book about the journey, focusing on the Philsopher Epicurus’s ideas about aging.

I loved this idea when I first read it. I applauded it.

Klein had a rich and meaningful time on those islands, watching the older men sit and talk and drink, play games, and watch beautiful Aegean sunsets. And then writing a best-selling book.

He loved Epicurus ideas about aging and set off to a Greek Island with a suitcase full of philosophy books.

The book, published in 2012, was a highly-acclaimed bestseller; NPR said it was one of the best and most important books of the year.

Publisher’s Weekly said it was a “delightful and spirited conversation, offering up the ingredients inherent to the art of living well in old age.”

I took this book with me on our mini-vacation last week, expecting to love it. It is well written and certainly fun. I wanted to learn how to live well in old age, I’m close.

But page by page, I got more and more uncomfortable.

I thought Klein’s aging decisions were insensitive and elitist, and for most normal people, wildly unrealistic and improbable. This struck me as a wealthy Manhattanite’s view of growing older.

The old men I know, I thought, are the children of Trump, they hate the people at NPR and other places who celebrate this idea of growing older, and who think what they need to do is fly to the Aegean islands for a year or so to discover the joy of doing nothing with their lives beyond looking for fun.

Most of them live hard lives, full of struggle and they complain all the time that no one has been paying any attention to them. They are right.

If you want to know where Trump came from – look around the country.

Epicurus is often associated with gourmet dining, but his focus was on how to age wisely and well.

Klein challenged the importance of making aesthetic decisions about his teeth in his seventies, and he rejected the tendency for aging people to fight or deny getting older (70 is the new 60, 80 is the new 70, etc.)

He was rebelling against the trendy notions of aging as something that can be delayed or avoided for years.

“This new creed,” wrote Klein, ” was everywhere I looked. If someone even casually mentioned that she was getting on in age, she was immediately chastened. She was informed that “Seventy is the new fifty.” she was admonished not to “give in” to old age.”

I related to this. I’ve often railed against what I call “old talk,” the stereotyping old people often do to themselves when they speak poorly of their lives.

But he didn’t look in the town where I live.

“All around me,” wrote Klein,” I saw many of my contemporaries remaining in their prime-of-life vocations, often working harder than ever. Others were setting off on expeditions to exotic destinations, copies of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die tucked in their backpacks.”

Klein also had little patience for people enrolling in classes to keep on learning.

I wondered how he could so glibly sneer at the “exotic” journeys of his friends in old age but not seem to realize that his book is all about one of those journeys. He had made the same choice.

Wait a minute, I wondered. I admire my friends – the blogger Janet Hamilton is one – who pursue life (she’s 55) with fierce courage and determination, even in the face of loss and grief, and shares her pain on her blog for others to learn from.

Epicurus has nothing for her in his musings.

I loved the first three pages of the book, but Klein, I realized, had put me off and set me on edge. I was getting angry.

Epicurus, it turned out, was something of a hedonist. I liked the idea so much I forgot to think about it. It is, of course, how we are programmed to see aging; it can be simple and pleasant if only we could forget what real life is like.

I don’t wish to do that. I accept real life; I don’t want to be blind to it.

Epicurus believed that life for older people was really about pursuing pleasure, good company, and pleasant moments.

Indeed, wrote Klein, Epicurus believed that to enjoy a truly gratifying life, one should withdraw completely from the public sphere; society would function remarkably well if everyone adopted a live-and-let-live policy, with each man seeking his own happiness.

I thought of Donald Trump again. Isn’t this precisely how he happened?  Each of us seeking our own happiness, while our very way of life was being stolen from us? I reached an opposite conclusion. I will never stop paying attention again.

While we slept, thieves crept into our lives in the night and almost stole our freedom from us.

I liked that the dreamy fantasy world of Epicurus, as far as it went, it evoked a bit of Thoreau on Walden Pond, pondering his life in solitude and without argument. But it didn’t go much farther. And Thoreau was a  young man when he went to Walden Pond.

Freed from the prison of everyday affairs, wrote Epicurus (Klein is on board with this), “an old man needs only to answer to himself.”

I’m afraid that is not true for me. I answer many people – my wife, my daughter, my granddaughter Robin, my readers, my neighbors, my friends, my sister. An old man is not free of responsibility for his life or his responsibility to others.

When my granddaughter Robin is a grown woman, I hope she doesn’t look back on her grandfather as someone who withdrew from his obligations as a citizen and a human being and sat around waiting for the sun to set.

According to Klein, an older man doesn’t need to stick to a strict schedule or compromise his whims to sustain his life. He can, if he wishes, sit for hours on end in the company of his friends, occasionally pausing to sniff the fragrance of a sprig of wild lavender.

At this point, I was done with the book and abandoned it – there was nothing there for me. I went on to read Tim O’Briend’s What They Carried, a poignant and heartbreaking account of young soldiers on combat patrol in Vietnam – a powerful look at what responsibility means and can cost.

As I thought about this best-selling idea of aging, I wondered if the problem was just that it doesn’t work in real life.

I can’t afford to chuck my health concerns and go off to the Greek Island for a year or so to study my navel and the navel of other older men with nothing much to do. And I don’t want to.

One of the responsibilities I take seriously is caring for my body in old age; it needs me more than ever. I don’t wish to lose all of my teeth; if my dentist says she can save them, I will try to find a way to do it.

It never would occur to a single one of the older men I know or to me to head off for exotic locations or spend thousands of dollars on college courses to stretch my horizon, which is long enough and old enough.

Will the Greek government pay my medical bills when my heart gives out in the Aegean sea?

I am the same age Klein was when he decided to run from his dentist. I closed my eyes and imagined telling my cardiologist that I did not need heart surgery to prolong my life for a few years, that I’d much rather go to Paris and read some poetry.

I shiver at the thought of ignoring my urologist and refusing to get my prostate fixed so I could pee all night in Rome and be exhausted all day there.

And what, I wondered do these charming and charismatic old men on the Greek islands have to teach me, is it their great pride and happiness to do nothing with great style and diligence?

I don’t have to go halfway across the world to do nothing; I can do it right here in the farmhouse or on a bench outside.

I don’t seek a life focused on pleasantness and good conversation. I want to understand the world around me and make it better if I can.

Another new responsibility I feel as an old man is to share some of the things I’ve learned in my lengthening life. Sometimes, they accomplish things Epicurus never thought of, or Klein doesn’t value much.

The older men I see in my town are suffering. Their knees and other joints hurt – a lot. They can’t afford their health care costs, trips abroad, or a sack of philosophy books, so they hurt greatly and wither visibly.

Their aging lives get harder by the year because they don’t have enough money or strength to ignore their doctors and sail around the world searching for adventure and wisdom.

This, of course, is why there is a Donald Trump and so many old white men love him. I think of the old men in the pharmacy who barter for five pills at a time because they can’t afford to pay for a month’s supply.

I watch them struggle to climb in and out of their cars and trucks; I wonder how they might navigate exotic trips to the other side of the world.

I think of the old men Klein’s age I see in the assisted care facilities where I volunteer; they mostly start vacantly out of windows for hours because there is no staff to help them and nothing to do. Medicaid does not pay for recreation and inspiration.

I would be bored out of my mind if I spent every afternoon of my life yakking with a bunch of other older men, trading jokes, starting at women, waiting for the sun to set, talking about their health.

The sun will set soon enough for me; I can wait for it.

I’m not running for office anytime soon,  but I like to write about politics now and then. It keeps me focused and sharp, and connected to my world. I don’t wish to cut myself off from that.

I’ve given up fighting and arguing; I’ve learned that some of the bad cells die off when I got older. I like the idea of finding peace and beauty in my safe harbor, my farm.

I’m glad I never stopped looking for love, even though I was into my 60’s when I found it. It’s still good.

I can’t wait to start up my radio show again and see if I can help people find perspective and understanding as they love their dogs and cats more and more, and sometimes too much.

I guess the problem for me is that I don’t wish to run from life – I tried that boring and pointless. Nor do I seek a life full of pleasantries.

Real-life is hard at any age, especially as one age. But that is also what gives it a challenge, purpose, and meaning. Reading Epicurus, I was grateful I don’t have a lot of money.

I can’t think of a better way to drain my life of meaning and make me sick of myself.

Epicurus was not afraid of death. He famously said, “Death is nothing to us since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. The absence of life is not evil; death is no more alarming than the nothingness before birth.”

A Danish philosopher named Soren Kierkegaard took issue with Epicurus’s simplistic, even trite dismissal of death as one big nothing.

We, humans, are the only species on the earth who are conscious that we will no longer be at all in the future, and that makes quite a difference to me.

I believe anyone who doesn’t sometimes tremble at the thought of death –  especially as they get closer to it – are trying to talk themselves into fantasy. They are dissembling, even diddling.

I don’t think of death all that much, but I respect it and stand in awe of it when I do. I’m glad that “nothing” will follow it, but I live in the now, and I hope I get to live a good long while. I have a lot of things to do, some of them pleasant, some of them not.

That, to me, is life.