OK, I am officially getting old.

My 50th birthday is at the end of May, but I’ve already been mailed a temporary AARP membership card.

If I send in my $12, then maybe they’ll trust me with the secret handshake for “senior coffee” at McDonald’s. (What is senior coffee, anyway? Java with a shot of prune juice?)

Actually, I think that if you drink too much senior coffee the sound that comes out of your mouth is “AARP!”

Seniors need secret hand signs, like gang members. I want to invent some old-man hand signs that mean: “Yo, yo, Gerald. Nice Members Only jacket, fellow.”

The arrival of my AARP membership card has renewed my anxiety about growing older with little kids in the house. I have two sons, ages 1 and 6. Most children this age do not have baby-boomer parents, and I’m worried that because of my influence they will be cultural misfits among children born of Gen-Xers and millennials.

“Am I a baby boomer?” my 6-year-old son asked me one night this week.

“No, you are a baby boomer’s baby,” I explained, confusing him more. “I am the baby boomer.”

“When will you boom?” he asked.

“Any minute,” I said.

I am beginning to believe that we boomers have the ability to pass along our genes.

For example, my oldest son’s favorite television shows are two of my childhood favorites: “Tom and Jerry” cartoons and “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Somewhere along the line they took all of the slapstick out of kid shows and injected them with what the movie-ratings people call “peril.”

My 6-year-old shook me out of my Sunday afternoon nap last week, nearly in tears with an example of “peril.” He was watching the 1991 Steven Spielberg film “Hook,” and he was upset that Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) was threatening to deposit kids into the ocean.

“They are about to drop the children into the sea,” he said, urgently shaking my arm. “Can I watch ‘Tom and Jerry’?”

“Tom and Jerry” has plenty of action, but none of it feels real. In a typical scene, Tom (the cat) pounds Jerry (the mouse) with a sledgehammer. Jerry walks around like a pancake with legs for three seconds and then retaliates by blowing Tom to smithereens with a stick of dynamite shoved down his trachea.

Now, that’s funny.

My 6-year-old will roll in the floor laughing at Tom and Jerry, but let a “mean guy” make an appearance in a modern Disney movie, and he is ready to burn the DVD.

We also enjoy black-and-white episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.” Little Opie Taylor and my oldest son are about the same age, and he can relate to some of Opie’s problems with slingshots and bullies.

He is a little perplexed by Otis the affable drunk. I can’t wait to introduce him to the Ernest T. Bass, the authentic Southern nut who recites poetry and pines for Charlene Darling.

Last night, we watched an episode about Aunt Bee’s famous homemade pickles, which Barney Fife dubbed “kerosene cucumbers.”

I asked my son, “Have you ever noticed that these Opie television shows don’t have any color?”

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s what people looked like in olden times.”

D’oh.