My friend and colleague Mitch and I used to play this awfully morbid game. We would try to figure out which celebrity death would make the front page of The New York Times, back when there was pretty much just the static, print version of the paper and not the endlessly mutating digital variety.

      Whose death was important enough to qualify for the imprimatur of the nation’s most important news source? Who would make it above the fold, the top half of the paper, the death being considered major news, up there with earthquakes and wars and political shenanigans?

      And whose death would instead be buried, so to speak, on page 26, along with all the other obits of minor novelists and respected but forgotten scientists and others who had one Warholian moment of fame?  

      I was just recently reminded of this morbid game when I came across the fact that Keith Richards—yes, that Keith Richards—has his 81st birthday this week.

      Keith had always been high up on our morbid list, because of his celebrity as co-leader of the Rolling Stones, which for a time qualified as the world's best rock band, and because for a time he qualified as the most degenerate member of one of the world’s most degenerate rock bands.

      And yet:

      Keith has already lived 15 years longer than my friend Tom, who chopped wood everyday and went for long swims every afternoon.

      Keith has already lived nine years longer than my friend Ralph who was so careful about what he ingested that he would argue with his doctors that he didn’t want to take one more pill or have one more surgical intervention.

      Keith has already lived nearly three years longer than I have.

      Yet I can’t imagine Keith doing what I now do when I go to the supermarket, what now takes me half an hour or so longer to do my shopping.

      I wander the aisles carefully reading the nutrition labels. Does this box of cookies have too much saturated fat? Is the level of saturated fat compensated by the level of polyunsaturated fat? Is the low-sodium veggie broth actually low enough? Why are the products that are low in fat high in sodium and the products low in sodium high in fat?

      Since my heart attack, in an attempt to last at least as long as Keith Richards, I not only check the nutrition labels, I’ve become far more careful about what I ingest. No more hot dogs, much less pizza, goodbye cheeseburgers.

      But then I think: After all the heroin, and all the cocaine, and all the smoking and drinking and staying up for 48 hours straight, Keith is still going strong, at the age of 81.

      As my cardiologist told me after my heart attack, you can’t outrun genetics. And Keith, apparently, has good genetics. His father—something of a carouser himself--lived to be 84.

      By the way, Mick already turned 81, back in July.