Sometimes life teaches you things you never wanted to know.

As I alluded to in a previous column, I broke my femur, or thigh bone, this past March 25th, when I went down on a patch of ice while bicycling. For those of you who do not know, the femur is the largest bone in the body, and ranks right up there with a select few other bones as, to borrow a phrase, “the mother of all broken bones.”

Up to that afternoon, I had a bounce in my step, in body, mind, and spirit, that belied my age, to others and to myself. I wrote in that previous column, with a chuckle, “it’s hard to look cool with a walker.” Well, all kidding aside, it has been hard, well-nigh impossible, to tap dance away from the reality of my age when going around and about utilizing first a wheelchair, then a walker, then a souped-up walker called a “rollator,” then walking sticks, now a cane. ( I say this about a cane even though I’ve found my way to a wooden one I tell folks Mick Jagger, who is now 81, would use if he broke his femur.) I don’t remember the words “at your age” being directed at me very often before March 25th. Since then, I’ve heard them more often than I’ve cared to. Indeed, those three words have been at the core of a crash course on being my age, a course for which I never remember signing up.

A week after my injury, I was in a rehab facility. Without any cause I could discern, having taken care of my excretory functions without creating any messes to be cleaned up, a nursing assistant asked me if I wanted some adult diapers. I intend no put down of adult diapers or of folks who need and utilize them, but a week before that I would have been more likely to see myself wearing a Speedo than an adult diaper.

Down the road a few months after that, I was having a chat with a young retail sales clerk, and the conversation had gotten around to my injury. She said, “My grandfather broke his hip, and he’s never been the same since.” She said this in an observational, guileless way, seemingly without the slightest thought that it might have been hard for me to hear about someone my age never coming back from a similar injury. Her tone was such that she might have just as well been saying, “My grandfather likes old black and white movies, too.”

With respect to this whole idea of my sense of self during the last five months being intertwined with others’ sense of me, I think of a back-and-forth I had with someone a couple of months after I broke my leg. I was at a community event, navigating around with a walker, and I ran into (not literally) a younger acquaintance of mine, whom I hadn’t seen or talked to in awhile. Without any preliminaries, he asked “Old age or an accident?” I quickly answered “An accident,” even though part of me knew the more accurate answer was probably “Both,” given the fact I’d gone down on the ice perhaps thousands of times as a young hockey player without breaking a bone. I preferred to be seen as someone cut down in the midst of robust exercise, rather than someone sliding into the fragilities of age.

Recently I had an aha moment. Although I was not a viewer of “The Simpsons,” I am familiar with Homer Simpson’s line, “Why do things that only happen to stupid people keep happening to me?” I was talking to my cousin, utilizing a cane, and telling him how difficult it had become for me to drive at night. I found myself letting out a laugh and saying, “Why do things that happen to old people keep happening to me?”

Now that I’ve brought Homer Simpson into things, I’ll turn to another thinker, the Lebanese poet Kahil Gibran. In his poem “Youth and Age,” he says in youth, “life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips ,and slapped my cheeks.” And then he says in age, “I steal a kiss from life’s lips.”

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I like the thought that no matter what my age, and no matter what that age pulls out of its bag of calamitous tricks, I can still look for and find moments to give life a smooch.

I suspect if I find my way to enough such moments, the bounce in my step will never go away, if visible only to me.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.