The number of United States professors aged 65 years and older is growing. This older professor presents the stories of four teaching experiences which belong to the larger story of faculty longevity during the past five decades and its subsequent conflicts with retirement. The first was in the 1960s, when she was a new professor, not much older than her own students, and the ambitions of the longevity movement were soon to become respectable. The second was in the 1980s, when she was a generation older than her students, and her career as a graduate dean began. The third was in the mid-1990s, when the U.S. ended mandatory retirement for professors and the question of aging in the classroom became inseparable from that of voluntary retirement. The fourth was in the late 1990s-2010, when she left her deanship and began teaching in the United Arab Emirates. There, she found a culture that grants age a core respect (absent from the youth-flaunting United States); where longevity signifies the virtues of tradition, the verities of family, and the strength to have survived in a harsh region.