Washington ? Sunday, July 21, was a seminal day.

Not in the way of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other marker day in history. But it was an enormous day for me.

It was the day that I got my first senior-citizen discount. Mind you, I did not seek it, and I did not want it. But it was given to me. And I have a feeling that as with all seminal days, nothing will be quite the same again.

I alighted from my small boat at the landing dock at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia home. The nice man who works for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Assn. said it would be $9 for each person and $8.50 for me, because I would get the senior-citizen discount. He did not ask for proof of my age, so I did not know at what age the discount begins. But, clearly, he could see I had passed that meridian.

My first reaction was to tell him that he had made a mistake. And my second was to remonstrate at why the discount was so small a shade past 5 percent. If I had joined a class, I wanted class action. I wanted to tell him that it was shameful that the discount was so small. Didn’t he know we old people have to struggle?

In 30 seconds I went, in my own mind, from being youthful to taking an interest in the privileges of age. I also was a little shattered that someone might think that my life’s work is behind me and I need special treatment in my dotage.

Off I went into my memory to see what great things senior citizens had accomplished. I recall that George Bernard Shaw wrote his greatest plays after he was 65; that Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain when he was 65; and that Konrad Adenauer was antique before he pulled Germany together after World War II.

I was comforted to recall all the senior executives that were being brought out of retirement across America to clean up the mess made by their younger cohorts. I was never that fond of Ronald Reagan, but I am feeling quite warm about him now that I realize that I am of an age where I can make mistakes and blame it on forgetfulness.

Actually, we are rather awful to old people in America. And I don’t mean locking them up in nursing homes. I mean a more subtle kind of abandonment: treating them as though they are no longer a part of the mainstream; treating them as non-combatants in life’s daily wars. Placing them, if you will, under glass.

It is the little insults we throw at the elderly that hurt. We treat them as if they were beyond life’s pleasures; neutered specimens in a laboratory heirs to privation but not to pleasure.

The greatest of the little hurts is the generational incuriosity about anything that happened to earlier generations. When I was a young newspaperman, we wanted to know about the greats in journalism who had preceded us. Now, it seems to me, young journalists are more interested in how they can get a great job than in how an earlier generation shaped the craft. Only in sports is there a healthy curiosity about the giants of yesteryear.

Of course, I am not talking about the big problems that affect the elderly, like health care, housing and mobility. Those have their seeds in the little exclusions that begin right after middle age.

Publications aimed at oh, ghastly euphemism people in their golden years, add insult, not comfort. They emphasize mortality, disease, impotence and financial implosion. Only one I know is joyous. It is called The Oldie and it is published monthly in London. And it emphasizes that unique pleasure that only older people can enjoy: reminiscence.

Anyway, having discovered on a hot Sunday afternoon in Mount Vernon that I am of a certain age (62, actually), I am off to reap some of the benefits of my newly learned status. I hear I can get a 10 percent discount on Amtrak, from certain taxi companies, and from select vendors. Also, I can remind my political friends that I now belong to the one class in society that votes rain or shine. Yes, I am a gray panther, and I want them to know it.

Llewellyn King is publisher of White House Weekly and the chairman and CEO of King Publishing in Washington, D.C. This column was distributed through Knight Ridder Tribune.