When did the Years Start to Slip away so Fast?

Certainly by the time I'd entered my fifties the acceleration had begun.  Which was what made the stunt (I can't deny that that's what it was) of going back to college in my late fifties so exquisitely savorous:  Time, perforce, stood still,  or took on another dimension, while I went from academic term to academic term--endless-seeming periods, wasteful and irrelevant in young lives, but the florescent temporalities of playful, jocund springtime in an old man's life.  The honors and awards--and the consistently high grades--that marked my progress through the mystic mazes of Academe, to me were only counters in a game that I was playing for fun...and profit....Well, and just a little bit, I must confess, in order to wreak Ineffable Vengeance on a System (the Way Things Are and Always Have Been) which, if I had been more credulous and trusting, or less faithful to myself and less plain damned lucky, would gladly and deliberately have devoured me early on. The horror and the infamy of the Sixties and the early Seventies, be it remembered, was not so much the shameful, utterly inexcusable military adventure in Viet Nam as such, but, rather, simply, the pure, unmitigated evil inevitable and inherent in the deployment for political purposes of an army raised in peacetime by compulsory military conscription.  There arose in me an anger, when in my freshman year at a land-grant college, I was compelled to take R.O.T.C., that was still only partially appeased fifty years later when the hopelessly hollow peremptory demands for "repayment" of the my college "loans" began to rain down upon me.  The one thing the vultures might have done to spoil my fun--hold up my grades--was obviated when, by a stroke of uncommon good fortune, some eight years ago, I slipped in a puddle of mop-water in a convenience store just down the block, and broke my left leg in three places, and was awarded $15,000 in an insurance settlement--of which I spent two thirds to purchase this the finest computer in the world, and one third, $5,000, of which I remitted to the University of Oregon in token repayment of my outstanding "debt."  A mere spit in the bucket of the $99,000+ owed and still accruing, but enough to evince my Good Faith, and to secure the release of my grades (3.92 GPA) transcript.