Four days after his 71st birthday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins was scheduled to play a concert in Boston. The date was September 11, 2001, and before he could leave his apartment in lower Manhattan, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

The concert was postponed, but five days later he played to a crowd trying – like the rest of us – to recover from the trauma. The recording of that album, “The 9/11 Concert,” is another Rollins masterpiece.

Recording masterpieces is what Rollins continued to do for another decade plus – until his pulmonary problems forced him to retire. This week, he died at the age of 95, after sharing his musical genius with the world for 65 years.

As a septuagenarian myself, I fully subscribe to the idea that creating – whether it’s music or writing – is something I can do until either my mind and/or body fails. 

The mental faculty it takes to process the world and present your view of it probably diminishes with age. But it doesn’t completely go away. Bruce Springsteen, at 76, still performs three-hour concert in multiple cities to packed houses. I just a saw a video of Robert Caro, age 90, working on the final volume of his Lyndon Johnson master opus – 983 pages are written so far and he still has a ways to go.

But there’s another mental process that does fade and become compromised as we get older.

That’s the ability to make decisions.

Making decisions is hard work. And especially if you have to make a lot of them – and those decisions are literally life and death for some people.

Barack Obama used to say that – other than the tan suit brouhaha – he never picked out his own clothes. Someone else went through his closet and set out his wardrobe for the next day. It was one less decision he had to make and he needed to save his energy for the choices that mattered.

I get it. I’ve been making decisions about all kinds of things for 72 years. And, having been an editor and desk manager in a real-time newsroom, I’ve had to make multiple decisions about what’s a story and what’s not, what belongs in a story and what needs to be left out, what’s a fact and what’s a mistake, and what word best conveys the idea.

It’s tiring. For me, I developed mental blocks that caused me to make mistakes. When I screwed up a monthly housing report at age 59, it made me question whether I needed to stop doing what I was doing. As it turned out, I did.

There’s one other thing about an older mind. It’s kinda stuck on ideas of what’s what.

Jon Stewart points out that Trump only seems to go after the late-night guys who are network TV – Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. It seems as though he has no idea who Stewart or John Oliver are. They’re not on legacy networks.

Trump knows there’s cable – he is, after all, the backbone of Fox News, Newsmax, One America and other right-wing outlets. 

Unfortunately, this country has decided that age is no obstacle to leadership.

For the first 26 years of my life, the oldest president in U.S. history was William Henry Harrison. He was 68 when he was inaugurated. He was also 68 when he died. Immediately after his inauguration, Harrison contracted pneumonia – he died a month later.

It was until Ronald Reagan that anyone older became president who was older than Harrison. And Reagan was 69 when he took office in 1981.

Our last three presidential elections have seen our nation elect men who were older than 70. In both 2020 and 2024, the winner was 78. Joe Biden turned 80 in the White House and Donald Trump turns 80 in the next month.

The problem here is that the presidency is a conflict. You can’t be inaugurated unless you’re at least 35 years of age.

But as we’re seeing, there’s a possibility that you can be too old. I thought Biden was a tremendous leader. But Jill Biden’s new book is probably going to make a lot of people think he aged too quickly and lost his way – as demonstrated in that godawful debate in June 2024 when Biden seemed lost and befuddled.

In Trump’s case, his incompetence at making decisions and his outdated notions of what the world is doing these days is compounded by his basic narcissism and inability to think about anybody other than himself.

Those are traits that also get worse as you get older, and stop caring about what other people think. I’m 72 – or, in his case, 80 – and I’m going to do as I damn well please. I’m not here that much longer anyway.

The point of all this is that if there’s ever been a time for a generational change in leadership, it’s now. The initial success of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani as New York’s mayor is proof that a younger generation, one that’s attuned to contemporary ideas and sees how important the future is, needs to get control of the works.

And it’s not as if old people should be put out to pasture. Sonny Rollins created great music into his 70s. Paul McCartney still writes songs in his 80s. I’m going to see James Taylor in a few weeks – he can still do great concerts.

It’s time for our generation to leave the hard work to the youngsters. Because we’ll screw things up with our old, faltering ways of thinking.