By DAN BISER

When my father was the age I am now, I thought he was old … ancient, even.

Now, I continue to stand in amazement each time the woman I married nearly 30 years ago gets mistaken as my daughter.

I’m still getting used to the fact that I’m eligible for senior citizen discounts and everything else encompassed by AARP.

Father Time has really zipped me through it, especially the past 20 years. The three bundles of joy I once rocked to sleep have long since taken flight. The youngest will turn 21 in less than two weeks and will be a senior at Chapel Hill in the fall. Things can’t have gone by that quickly, yet somehow they have.

But then again, I once considered my age as being old … ancient, even.

Just last week, my wife and I were in Durham visiting her brother when I got engaged in a ping-pong match with his 12-year-old son. Granted it had been nearly 20 years since I last played, but the kid still beat me at a game in which I won a dormitory championship while in college. What’s happening here?

Just like a ping-pong ball, perspectives on life can be batted back and forth pretty fiercely through the years. Still, nothing can stop us from growing older.

I feel I led a pretty sheltered existence while growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. For most of the values under which I was raised, I remain eternally grateful. Sometimes I wish I had been able to have more responsibility in my youth so I could have been set up to have to handle more of the hard knocks, but I’m not really complaining.

I was halfway through college when the movie “Love Story” hit the big screen. When the Ryan O’Neal character (the son of ridiculously rich New Englanders) reaches a conflict with his father over his marriage intentions with Ali McGraw’s “modest-means” character, I recall thinking then what a totally uncaring, disrespectful man his father was.

When I watched the movie again recently on DVD, I found myself thinking what a totally uncaring, disrespectful son the Ryan O’Neal character had suddenly become ... more than 30 years later.

My father, a World War II Navy veteran, taught physics at a good-sized university less than a mile from our house. He wanted his three sons to go to whatever college each wanted to attend … except the one at which he taught.

It wasn’t so much that he was tired of having us around the house (even though I’m sure he needed the break), he just wanted us to start experiencing life from outside our own back yard there in Beaumont, Texas. None of us ever returned to live in our hometown because we had been encouraged to expand our horizons.

My father will turn 84 in June, having long outlived any male on both sides of the family. My mother’s death four years ago took away much of his charisma and outlook because they had been inseparable and totally devoted through nearly 56 years of marriage.

Dementia and the early stages of Alzheimer’s have taken much of his once extremely sharp mental faculties, even though at times he is still as alert and witty as ever. He requires assisted living at a retirement center in East Texas but has carried a good attitude since arriving there.

Even these days, while in the presence of my father, I still feel I am the 18-year-old headed off to college relying greatly on his advice and wisdom. Despite all the frailties and frustrations brought on by his extended years, his character is still one that I greatly lean on. That’s probably because I often feel that I have fallen so short of attaining it myself.

I only hope that if and when my time reaches the same stage (and I know that it is not that far off), I will be able to handle it as well and that my children will be able to regard me in the same fashion.