Grays on The Go

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But it is not just that the elderly are living longer, healthier lives. They are living them differently. Look around the Sunbelt. Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada have some of the country's fastest-growing populations of those over 65. In some places it seems a wholly different, more leisurely universe, full of choices and passions long delayed. There is Hulda Crooks, 91, who has climbed 97 mountains since she turned 65, most recently Mount Fuji in Japan. And Dentist James Jay, 74, who finished, along with 51 other septuagenarians and four octogenarians, that 26-mile ribbon of pain, the New York City Marathon. And Virginia Peckham, 69, known on San Clemente beach as "That Crazy Old Lady," riding an orange-and-white boogie board and shouting surfing mantras. And Etta Kallman, 77, writing knowingly about "The Metabolism of the Dinosaur" and winning awards for academic excellence from New York University. And Jane Stovall, 103 next week, a onetime milliner, author, tango dancer and seniors golf champion and, at 89, a student pilot.

Then there are the seasoned boys of summer: the Kids-Kubs softball league of St. Petersburg, Fla., where rookies must be at least 74 to don the white Good Humor man uniform and black bow tie. The team has its own special rules, Harry Rylee told TIME Correspondent Michael Riley. "You've got a couple of guys there that you could eat a sandwich while they're running to first base," muses the outfielder, whose brothers Morris and Michael play shortstop and infield. "But you can't tell 'em they can't play. That'd be like sticking a knife in them."

For many of the relentlessly young, the attitude is born out of a community + life that resembles nothing so much as their college years of half a century ago: a life of options, dates, lessons and sudden, surprising fellowship. Florida Gerontologist Otto Von Mering, 65, refers to the "fictive kinship," whereby older people acquire a new support system long after their families and friends have dispersed. Take Liz Carpenter. At 65, the twangy-voiced former press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson started writing a book. At 66, she found romance -- with a man she had known when she was 20. Now 67, she has devised her cardinal rules for aging: entertain a lot, never pass up an invitation, and by all means fall in love. On a hilltop outside her home in Salado, Texas, she entertains friends in the Jacuzzi she calls her "golden pond." Every month she gathers with fellow members of the Bay at the Moon Society, a group of large-lunged Texans who meet at a different ranch to sing and holler at the midnight sky. "Aging has become very stylish," Carpenter concludes happily. "All the best people are doing it."