By SAM ROBERTS

In 1942, when James Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool, the average life expectancy of a British infant boy was 63 years. Notwithstanding those expectations and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his death decades ago, Mr. McCartney turns 64 on Sunday, Father's Day.

He was a teenager when he wrote the tune for "When I'm Sixty-Four," and only 24 when the Beatles recorded it in 1967 for "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." But just as George Orwell's "1984" proved to be an abiding prophecy of a dystopic future for so many impressionable readers, Mr. McCartney's lyrics delivered to a self-consciously youthful generation an enduring if satirical definition of what their golden age might be like "many years from now."

Today, many of those who embraced that quaint vision of enduring love, caring, knitting and puttering in retirement