“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” Bette Davis famously said, or at least is widely credited with saying. She reportedly even had the phrase embroidered on a pillow, which seems about right for a woman who spent her career refusing to be delicate about anything.

Which brings me to Clint Eastwood and aging. At 96, Eastwood has offered some hard truths about getting old. Bones get stiffer. Muscles get weaker. Bright lights become annoying. Breathing can require more effort. As the years pile up, people who knew you when you were young begin disappearing. Friends, relatives, classmates, colleagues. Basically, the people who remember your bad hair, questionable romantic choices and that thing you did in 1978 that you were hoping nobody would ever mention again. Eventually, you realize you're carrying a whole lot of history that nobody else remembers.

“And apparently, this is why old people tell the same stories over and over,” supposes Eastwood. We, of a certain age, not even close to Eastwood’s 96 years, know what he’s talking about.

A story begins. You've told it before. Everyone knows where it's going. In fact, someone else could probably deliver the punchline. But then, just when they think they’ve escaped, you hit the poor listeners with something new.

“Did I ever tell you about the dog?”

Yes.

“You remember the dog?”

Yes.

“Well, there were actually two dogs.”

Memory, after all, is not a filing cabinet where you put things away and forget about them. It's more like a junk drawer. You keep digging around and finding things you forgot you owned.

For example, a song comes on and suddenly you're 25 again. You smell someone's perfume and remember a person you haven't thought about in 40 years. You drive past an old building and remember who you were when you walked through its doors. And sometimes a story is the only way to bring a loved one back for a few minutes. Which is probably why some of us are reluctant to shut up. I won’t name names.

Unfortunately, technology can make the thrill of live storytelling difficult. You can be halfway through a fascinating tidbit, when suddenly your half-listener looks down at their glowing rectangle and mutters, “Did you know a tomato is technically a fruit?”

“Yes. But I'm getting to the good part.” The rat in my first apartment. The sound of my best friend's laugh. What it felt like to headline rock clubs in 1981, to see my picture in the newspaper, and to frequent places that no longer exist. You won’t find those things on Google.

And just like the good part of a story, aging can mean getting to a better part of life despite the hardships that Eastwood lists. There are senior discounts, for one thing. You care less about what other people think. You know what you like, what you don’t like and, perhaps most importantly, what simply isn’t worth putting up with anymore. You can leave a party early without inventing an excuse. You can say no without explaining yourself. And after enough years of making mistakes, you begin to realize that most things that once seemed like a crisis eventually become a story.

Still, we live in a culture that can sometimes be remarkably dismissive of anyone over 70, as though reaching a certain age somehow erases everything that came before. As if we haven't lived through decades of love, loss, mistakes, adventures, bad decisions, good decisions and things nobody else could possibly remember.

Maybe that's why we tell the stories. Not because we've forgotten we've told them, but because they still matter to us. Because for a few minutes, we're not just an annoying older person. We're the person who was there. My pillow, when I get around to embroidering it, will probably say, “I’m getting to the good part.”