I have taken the same walk nearly every morning for more than five years. I have memorized every crack in the sidewalk, every shade tree and every flower bed.

That gives me the mental bandwidth to think about things other than finding my way back home. On a recent walk, I devoted my bandwidth to comparing my life, at age 67, to the lives of my parents when they were 67. It was an interesting enterprise that other people might enjoy trying.

When she was 67, my mother’s four children had all gotten married, and four of her grandchildren had been born. By that metric, she was pretty far ahead of me. Our daughter is single, and I’m no grandpa.

Here’s another metric. At 67, my mother was four years from her finish line. She was still working (I’m five years retired), but work was pretty much the only place she ever went. Her lifelong nicotine addiction had taken its toll. She was tethered to an oxygen tank, and getting to work every day was nearly all she could manage. She had always been sedentary, and damage to her lungs exacerbated that. I’d like to think that, inspired by my mother’s example, I’ve made a choice or two that will help me get more than the 71 years that she had.

When my father turned 67, three of his four children had gotten married, and three of his four grandchildren were on the scene. At 67, he had nine years left before my mother died and another 20 years ahead of him.

My father’s life at 67 was similar in many ways to my life today. As long as I knew him, my father did calisthenics drawn from a Canadian military fitness manual. In his later years, he had a membership at an indoor pool where he swam regularly. The calisthenics were an echo of his youthful athletic pursuits while the swimming connected him to a happy part of his youth on the Jersey shore. I like to think that by walking every day I am following in my father’s footsteps, at least metaphorically.

My father’s other great occupation in his 60s, 70s and 80s was youth sports. He spent countless hours watching his grandchildren play in rec leagues, high school and college. I did the same with our daughter, and feel like I am honoring his memory by staying on the sidelines long after our daughter graduated from high school. If I am not misremembering, after my nieces and nephews retired from sports, my father found other young athletes to cheer on, just as I have.

I cherish the similarities between my life at 67 and my father’s life at that age, but there are also differences, areas in which I have been more fortunate than he was. At 67, my father was seven years past the failure of his coal business. For 16 years, he had risen through the ranks at Peabody Coal Company, supporting a comfortable life in a leafy suburb. Never fully at ease as the man in the gray flannel suit, he set out on his own in 1976, starting up his own coal sales company. For a time, he did well. But 10 years in, the business collapsed, taking with it the house my siblings and I grew up in.

For the rest of his life, my father dabbled in other business ventures, but none really took off. When he died, his estate included a storage locker full of industrial filters, the inventory left over from his last sales venture.

My father’s business failure also tore a hole in my parents’ social circle. When they moved from their suburb to an apartment complex, their country-club friends fell (or were pushed) away. When my father was 67, two of his children and four grandchildren lived nearby, so he saw them regularly, but that was pretty much the extent of his social life, apart from random conversations in the swimming pool locker room.

I have been luckier than that. Through my dogwalking, work at a local art gallery, and my involvement with youth sports, I have hundreds of acquaintances, dozens of good friends and several families who have all but adopted me. I am reminded of the statement by Lou Gehrig when he retired from the New York Yankees: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”

In the end, my mental journey to my parents’ 68th years was a bit melancholy, but at the same time, I am filled with gratitude. Every parent wishes for their children to do better than they did, and my parents gave me all the tools to do just that.

Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.