LIFE LESSON VANITY, THY AGE IS 60.

Byline: Jonathan Dobrer Local View

AS a ``child of the '60s,'' it was pretty shocking actually to hit 60. The thing is: Sixty hits back. Unlike 40, when I mistakenly thought I was going to be grown up, or 50, when I began wrestling with my mortality, 60 seems to be more serious than mere mortality.

I kind of accept my finitude - as if I had a choice. It is not my finitude but my decrepitude that really troubles me. For all of my occasional pretense of deep thinking, I find some fairly shallow shoals where my vanity keeps popping to the surface.

When I was 40, I gave up smoking. I'd smoked a pipe since I was 15. I knew it wasn't good for me. I could feel my breath shortening and, of course, I stank like camel dung - the telling mark of a fine Latikia tobacco. But it was not health per se that got me to put the pipe down and quit, cold turkey, the first time I tried. It was vanity.

I'd seen a segment on ``60 Minutes'' that showed people dying of cancer of the jaw. It was ugly. Death, well, that I knew about, but ugly, with tubes and prosthesis, just wasn't acceptable. (Yes, I know that Sigmund Freud died of cancer of the jaw - the result of his cigars and pipes. He is said to have remarked to a woman who approached him at a party and greeted him in French, ``I am sorry, madam, but my prosthesis doesn't speak French.'')

Three years ago my vanity brought me to Dr. Franco to take some sunspots off my face. He looked at me and indicated that at 251 pounds, my skin should probably not be my first concern. He thought I'd look a hell of a lot better with about 60 fewer pounds hanging off my multiple chins and rolling over my belt. (My chins did not extend so far as to actually roll over my belt. That would be, in fact, my waist.)

``OK,'' I agreed, and lost the weight. I did this sensibly and under his supervision. It took about four months. I've maintained the loss and follow a regime of workouts and exercise - out of vanity. It was not as if I hadn't known that the excess weight was bad for me. It was finally that I didn't like how I looked.

All of these dealt with remediable conditions - surface issues of vanity covering the obviously more important issues of health and life.

Now, at 60, again the vanity of vanities strikes me - and I may turn to religion and become more observant. And again, it is not directly an issue of my mortality. You see, I just saw a bald spot, just big enough to be covered by a kippah, a Jewish skullcap. Instead of turning to religion for my soul, it may be to cover the hole in my hair. Or is that a hole in my head?

Oy. I don't like the sound of any of this.

I've always loved gray hair, and half of my hair is turning silvery. But that nice silver half seems to be in a race with the other half that is bailing out or being devoured by the sharp and merciless teeth of my comb.

Meanwhile, hair seems suddenly to flourish where it never grew before. Perhaps as the chest falls toward the waist, the hair migrates from the top of the head to the ears. I may not actually be hard of hearing. My ears may just be plugged with unwanted growth.

However vain I might be, and however southward my hair may roam, I will not be letting it grow long and be tempted by the dreaded, and often dreadful, comb-over. That is not vanity. That is both denial and futility.

In fact, there is no hairstyle or workout, no plastic surgery or miracle cure for the relentless teeth of time. All I can do is live one precious day at a time and try to make good decisions about those things that are, at least partially, under my control. If I do the right thing for the wrong reason, it is still probably better than doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

Still, the vanity of it all makes me a bit ill at ease, not so much with mortality but with those shallow shoals of self.

So, as for the skullcap: Well, I won't be doing that. It is probably of greater religious value to be reminded of my finitude and acknowledge the reality of what T.S. Eliot called ``the skull beneath the skin.''