In later life I often appeal to the statute of limitations. These days I invoke it the way I never did when young or even middle-aged.

This legal expression usually means that, after a certain lapse of time, some crimes are no longer worth prosecuting. The sixteen-year-old pickpocket will not be arrested for that infraction when he or she is forty-five.

In my case, of course, the phrase has quite a different meaning. I use it largely to excuse myself from doing things I don’t want to do.

Eating salad, for example. Almost always I hate salad. To my taste, the green stuff lacks exactly that  — taste. I regard it as flat and unprofitable, an eating experience that leaves one unrewarded.

In the past, I would have dutifully eaten a full helping of it, especially if my wife Susan pushed me into it. As a confirmed lover of salad herself, she considers the salad course as a necessary and highly desirable feature of every main meal.

Like many other salad lovers, Susan argues for its therapeutic value. She sees it as basic to one’s wellbeing. But she even thinks it tastes good, the main point on which we disagree.

Previously (you could say in my salad days), I would submit to her demands for me to eat the stuff. Now, however, I invoke my favorite statute. Like a kid pressured by his mother toward eating spinach, I take my stand against salad.

At the risk of name-dropping, let me recall that Julia Child once told me how, even during her childhood years, she did not feel forced to eat everything on her plate. Her example encouraged me to avoid leafy greens without shame.

Now, I realize that refusing to eat this staple of the dinner table might well limit my longevity. Maybe I am cutting weeks, months, even years off my allotted lifetime. At this rate, how will I ever challenge Jeanne Calment’s world record of 122 years?

Counting on theologian Paul Tillich’s saying, “Man’s negations are more powerful than his affirmations,” I persist in invoking the statute.

And not just with salad. When it comes to zucchini, broccoli, and boiled potatoes (unless the latter are doused with butter), I also take a stand.

In all of this discussion, I remain painfully aware of the starving people across the world for whom the food rejected by me might bring escape from starvation.

This idea is hardly novel (our parents expressed it long ago) but it is nonetheless valid, and distressing.

Fortunately, the statute of limitations does not apply only to the dinner table. Positively, the legal maxim justifies me in doing things I would formally not have dared do.

Speaking to strangers is something I now do with impunity. Anyone who walks down my street faces the danger of being greeted by me. Let them look as startled (or as disapproving) as they wish; still they will be on the receiving end of my salutation.

Were anyone to challenge me for this practice, I would promptly invoke the relevant statute.

I also feel free to ask for favors. This might mean, for instance, asking a neighbor to drive me to a medical appointment when, because of medications or anesthesia, I cannot drive myself. I would also dare to ask for help in shoveling out my car, were it snowed in by a winter storm.

These unconventional acts have become somehow legitimated by the passage of years. The same things that would have been regarded as improper earlier in my life are now seen, at least by me, as OK, even proper and socially desirable. I no longer need anyone’s permission to do them.

The same criteria apply to moves in the other direction, my doing favors for others. Recently, I have had the pleasure of giving a memoir, written and published by me, to virtually all of my neighbors and many of my friends and colleagues.

This gesture could well be seen as vain or at least eccentric. However, unconventional as it may have been, this unexpected gift has turned into an inventive way of enhancing friendships.

Even shy people, who usually cannot find anything to talk about, now have plenty of material to discuss with me. Up to now I may have appeared a stolid burger not capable of doing anything out of the ordinary. Now they know better.

All in all, it’s surprising how much you can get away with in later life. Whatever their motives, younger people will give you a lot of leeway.

And taking advantage of that leeway is no sin or misdemeanor. As Barry Goldwater would have said of this situation,  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

Can you imagine a column ending any more felicitously than with a quote from Goldwater?