I sit there quietly in my 2017 white Prius in the Shaw’s Market parking lot three times a week — some days early in the morning, sometimes later in the afternoon — watching “old” people walk from their cars to the entrance.

I’m probably 10 years older or more than most them. And here I sit, looking 60.

“Old” is the dreaded word we use from first grade until the day when we throw a ball and it falls inches away. Yeah! Like that.

It gets worse when we start wearing warmer socks and turtleneck sweaters and return to warmer hoodies.

I qualify, I suppose, as an “older” man, being a nonagenarian, a word I will soon wear on a new hoodie. So be it.

I have two different legs now — one a 20-year-old dancer’s leg, and the other, the 65-year-old leg of an aging Boston hotel doorman that has begun to give me an unflattering limp.

A limp, unless you’re a high school skate boarder, has young women holding heavy doors open for you. Yeah. Like that.

So, reaching back to my New York theater training, I learned to disguise it by adapting a street boy’s swagger. Yeah. Like that.

But the Oval Office’s Joe can’t employ such disguises. He’s “President Joe” and he has to walk across that wet green lawn to the chopper as gracefully as he can.

On the 6:30 news, I watch him move toward the Air Force guards at the stairs, carefully, returning their salutes with that Delaware Irish street boy smile, while all the while whispering to himself as I now do, “Don’t fall, Joe, don’t fall.” Yeah, exactly like that.

I haven’t reached that moment yet, but I confess to using the wonderful wrought iron railing wherever a building offers it.

Because I fear slipping, as I did once at 50 and, like Joe, falling to one knee as an “old” lady passes by smiling.

But there is President Joe, slipping even as he grips the railing to his official helicopter, as a young aide just behind him is thinking, “Poor Joe, he’s lost Kamala’s young hand on his arm.” Like that!

I will confess to falling once as I lugged two large boxes and a black garbage bag to the garage, juggling them carelessly like a stoned Parisian circus clown.

Down I went to the cold concrete. I laid there for a couple of minutes shaking my limbs to make sure they were pain-free and got quickly up before an “old lady” might pass by leading “something” on a leash and thinking, “Poor J.P. He’s lost Kay’s firm hand on his arm.”

Only yesterday, a tiny lady on the far side of nonagenarian land, hobbled past my car and paused to take a deep breath.

When she started up again, she had to grab hold of the signpost with the blue and white handicapped sign.

I “leapt” (sort of) from the car and took her arm and walked her to the sliding doors. As we entered, my foot slipped and she smiled and said, “Oh! Don’t fall.”

Did she just say, “Don’t fall?”

Yeah, she did. Just like that.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.