It wasn’t the Bono I had worshiped throughout the 1980s.

It wasn’t the Bono with the luxuriant hair pulled dramatically back from his angular, handsome, face, into a sweeping pony tail, guitar slung over one broad shoulder, lithe and muscular body rippling beneath his torn T-shirt. This was the Bono who cheerily announced he’d just had dinner with the former NC senator, Jesse Helms. And clearly he’d eaten something scattered and smothered for, as he began to sing the lyric, “She moves in mysterious ways,” he gave a suggestive shimmy, which jiggled the Guinness belly threatening to spill over the top button of his black jeans.

“That wasn’t pretty,” Paul remarked.

Lost for words, I simply gaped.

Even worse, while there was a slew of young people threaded within the crowd, the majority were distinctly middle aged: slightly tubby with receding hairlines and bifocals.

In short, my age. Oh, the horror of it all…

When the concert was finished and everyone’s cell phones, their light having replaced Bics years ago, stowed away, Paul and I fought our way through the crowd, and headed to our car to begin our trek home.

“Good Lord, I feel completely jet lagged,” I croaked the next morning, coming in from the barn. “Why am I so tired? All we did was go to a concert.”

“And leave sober,” Paul added, pouring his second coffee.

“I guess I’m used to dozing off on the sofa by 9,” I mused, “and my schedule has been completely thrown. I feel like going straight back to bed.”

So, I’d like to apologize, in advance, publicly, to The Eagles: I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a pass this November. And if you don’t sell out your concert, for heaven’s sake, don’t take it personally. It’s not that your fans no longer love you or think you unworthy of a pricey ticket.

We’re just too damned old.