Putting life into perspective

When I wonder if I've lived a worthwhile life, I always take cold comfort in the words of piano player, Harvard mathematician and humorist Tom Lehrer.

Lehrer once said (adjusted to my own 43 years) that "When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for eight years."

Coutesy of "Things Other People Accomplished
When They Were Your Age" -

At age 43:

Music teacher William Herschel discovered Uranus.

Marie Curie won her second Nobel prize, for the isolation of pure radium.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man elected to the United States presidency.

Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Timofeyevich Beregovoi was the oldest man ever to join the cosmonaut corps.

Baseball player Nolan Ryan pitched the sixth no-hitter of his career.

Annie Taylor, a widowed school teacher, went over the 160-foot-high Horseshoe Falls in a barrel.

Isabel Peron, a former professional dancer, became the first female chief of state in the Americas when she took over as President of Argentina.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the poem Kubla Khan.

Sarah Byrd Askew created the first bookmobile.