Stonington — Retired advertising executive Tim Love started confronting the idea of aging in a young man's industry when he hit the supposedly "irrelevant" age of 50.

The over-50 marketing category tends to be relegated to a distant outpost of advertisers' consciousness. But Love, a now retired former vice chairman for the international communications giant Omnicom Group, soon realized that Baby Boomers like him were far from irrelevant — in fact, getting better with age — and should put complaints over aches and memory slippage behind them while focusing on the positives of getting older.

For the next 15 years, Love compiled snippets of opinion and observations from friends, acquaintances and family to back his belief that some things, at least, improve with age. And last month he came out with a new hardcover book called "The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging" that takes a lighthearted view of senior life.

"You need to think about things that get better with age," Love remembers telling a good friend after hearing various bodily complaints related to aging.

And that started the wheels spinning.

"I started taking notes," Love said. "I kept a record of things that people said."

Two years ago, he enlisted the aid of friend Terry Demaline to do the book's illustrations. Peter Hubbell, founder of the advertising agency BoomAgers that Love serves on its board of advisers, wrote the 72-page book's forward.

It's a book that, as the brief chapters go on, amusingly increases in type size to reflect a not-so-funny aspect of aging: declining eyesight. He hopes to come out with a second compilation based on new suggestions inspired by the book.

So what gets better with age? Truth, he said, such as being able to tell people you love them, gets easier as time goes along. As his friend Tom Burrell says in the book, "There's no reason to hold back any longer."

Appreciating differences is another harbinger of advanced-age wisdom, Love contended, pointing to a New York magazine illustration in his book of a woman in a swimsuit flanked by a female Muslim in a burka and a nun in a habit. Everything about the picture screams uncomfortable, but the older you get the more you can find connections among even disparate world views, said Love, who has lived in Belgium, Singapore and Tokyo.

"People can come up with different answers to the same question," Love quotes Sam Kim, a friend who has had a long career with Procter & Gamble, as telling him. "When you can respect and harness diversity in recognizing and appreciating differences, then you can truly come up with powerful and breakthrough solutions."

Driving the speed limit gets better with age, he added, since getting somewhere faster seems less and less important as compared to arriving in one piece. Dealing with authority, forgiveness and friendships are a few of the other areas that improve the older we get, according to Love's book.

Love, who has had booksignings at Stonington Free Library, Bank Square Books and the StoneRidge retirement community among other venues, also had a release party at Hearst Publishing in New York City. Much of the proceeds have been going to charities, he added.

Love has a ton of stories from his years in the advertising business working side by side with icons such as Tom Burrell and Kevin Roberts. He also has been heavily involved in pushing the government to develop new strategic marketing ideas to deal with the threat of global terrorism.

But for now he is happy to have put out a simple book that seems to have resonated with fellow Baby Boomers.

"This didn't feel as vain as writing a book about advertising," he said. "This was unexpected."

l.howard@theday.com

Twitter: @KingstonLeeHow 

WHAT: "The Book That Gets Better With Age"

WHO: Author Tim Love

PUBLISHER: LID Publishing, 72 pages, hardcover

PRICE: $24.99

AVAILABLE: Amazon.com, Bank Square Books