I’ve just completed another orbit around the sun and I’m getting well practiced at it. I’ve passed “go” more than 5 ½ dozen times so far.

I did not get to collect $200, but on one of my previous trips I earned a Medicare card. It’s not quite the same as a get-out-of-jail-free card, but at my age, there’s not much call for one of those. These days, I’m more likely to drop off for a nap than raise a ruckus. But I am NOT getting old. Oh, no. I’m becoming a classic.

By definition, “old” refers to the age. “‘Classic’ implies that it’s not just old, but also of enduring value and still relevant today,” according to what that new-fangled AI stuff told me.

Flip through your TV offerings and you’ll find bunches of channels dedicated entirely to valuing the good old days — TV Land, Boomerang, TCM, Nick at Nite, and MeTV (Motto: “The Definitive Destination for Classic TV.”).

My classic buddy Tom and I prefer the old shows.

Tom and I have been best friends since junior high school back in the ’70s — the 1970s, that is, not the 1870s. We’re not THAT classic yet.

Even so, we’re more likely than ever to venture into classic literature. Tom told me that he just finished reading a classic novel, one that was written in 1818.

It was one of those thick, ponderous volumes, the kind of deadly instruments that literature teachers inflicted on us students because the Board of Education frowned on excessive use of torture racks and thumbscrews.

Tom finished the dusty old book in a couple of days. He’s starting on another volume of classic literature, this one a bit newer. It was written in 1897. He has two more novels from the 1800s lined up.

“It’s weird,” Tom said. “I didn’t really want to read the classics in school and now that I’ve ‘matured,’ I’m interested in them.”

This is one of the curiosities we have discovered about aging. In our youth, we dismissed it. Now we are it.

Even more astounding is that our sadistic literature teachers may actually have been dealing us a kindness, introducing us to classics.

We want to be classics — valuable and relevant. In other words, cool.

I know nothing about Top 40 music. I don’t know if there still is such a thing as Top 40 these days. I tune into classic rock stations. It’s the music that now plays in elevators. But at one time, ah, at one time…

My late wife and I happily attended a Doobie Brothers 50th anniversary concert a few years back. It wasn’t just a wrinklies convention. We saw a lot of young punk kids in the crowd grooving to the songs we loved decades earlier.

These are the kids that have an appreciation for classics (although “Black Water” and “Long Train Runnin'” still sound pretty current to me).

One of my favorite groups from my youth is the Classics IV. Through Stormy or Sunny weather, I sang along with Traces of their Spooky little songs long before the four (and sometimes six) became classics. (If you caught all those song titles in the last sentence, and hummed along, you’re probably a classic, too.)

With age comes wisdom. And senior discounts. And an appreciation for how cool the classics really are. Like us.

Also, our music was just plain better.

So for all the other kids my age and Tom’s age, don’t worry about hiding your classic novels behind a copy of Modern Romance or Current Affairs magazines. Be proud. We’re not dusty old relics without any relevance whatsoever.

Nope. We’re classics.

Get out the feathered quill and write Classic Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on that old classic, Facebook.