Lately my long-suffering spouse has redoubled her efforts to divert me from excessive employ. A rolling stone gathers no direct deposit. Darn clever she is, too. We go to Broadway and Bruce, Canada and California. I memorize the room so when I wake at night I'll know where the bathroom is. Can't complain. When I was with ABC News, friends routinely inquired into my upcoming destinations so as to avoid these places. The thinking was that if I were going there, trouble was either brewing or boiling over. A reasonable strategy for sure. I've been too close for comfort in the neighborhood of bombs, bullets, biological weapons and bad men. I was a boy, and the world was my toy. Those were the days, my friend.

Now, all is pacific across our friendlier oceans. The greatest threat is a flight cancellation. With the piratical tales I once told my young cousins, I learned later they believed I was a spy, not a journalist. I rode slow elephants and ran with slow horses. Now, I'm lucky if I get very far without the dogs barking. Wheeling about, I'm at that rest stop on the byways of life where I nod off imagining roads less traveled by that my doppelgänger might have trod. Too late now -- at least for espionage. Cue the shoe phone.

Existentially, I have a hard time processing the concept of hanging out in the waiting room for the great beyond. Plant me on a beach and watch me brood. I see the French as nuts, taking to the streets to preserve their kicking back at age 62. No wonder they've been in the doldrums since Napoleon met his Waterloo. I'll take their champagne, to say nothing of the films of Francois Truffaut -- guideposts for my misspent youth. I saw myself as Jean-Pierre Leaud's character Antoine Doinel, only less handsome and winsome. I didn't suffer his "400 Blows," but it wasn't easy street either.

The Bidenesque question of when to step off the stage isn't one of age alone. Rock stars burn out by bad habits long before the rest of us. Tony-winner "Stereophonic" tells the tale. If the road doesn't wreck them, they do it to themselves. The list is long. Elvis left the building. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison never made it out of their 20s. Michael Jackson and Tom Petty took a lethal cocktail. I'm still mad at all of them. Though Petty made it to full retirement age, he still had miles to go. He didn't have to live like a refugee.

Then there are those Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They never hang up their rock 'n' roll shoes. When I worked with Mick for an Obama White House performance, the lead singer put on his "felony shoes" -- cop talk for sneakers -- and ran six miles every day to retain his svelte figure onstage. At the age that I am now, he could still give his audiences satisfaction. And today, in their age-defying 80s, the Stones released a rocking record and toured cross-country. As for Keith, he's beat the reaper so many times that we can all repeat "I'll have what he's having." Well, more like what he's having now.

King of the road is Bob Dylan. The journeyman was singing of "Fixin' to Die" and "In My Time of Dyin''' on his very first album, still a teenage dreamer. Having outlasted his "Neverending Tour," with a longtime smoker's voice that has caught up to his earlier Woody Guthrie vocal stylings, this song-and-dance man clearly intends to drop the mic onstage. Most unlike his onetime paramour, Joan Baez, who is no longer dancing barefoot across the boards. Then there's the indefatigable Bruce Springsteen, born to run and boss of the backstreets, 50 years on, yet still taking audiences through a three-hour rock revival meeting replete with blood, sweat and tears.

Far from these boldface names, my septuagenarian internist finally gave in to pressure from his practice and hung up his stethoscope. I pray he doesn't follow in the footsteps of our neighbor who retired one day and fell dead the next in a hole he had dug in his yard. It would have been convenient for his widow had zoning laws allowed backyard burial.

The cliche is that some work to live and others live to work. In the daytime, I get along just fine mixing work and play, but come nightfall, the dark wings come out to carry me into existential dread. When you're midway, life just goes on. Madison Avenue kicked out my mother in her 40s, but she took up real estate for decades more, and nearing 100 she imagined herself back at her desk, crafting ad copy. You go, mom. And so she went.