Old? Who me? Of course

"The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has had many people to love" Jean Renoir



Hey, everyone, I just had another birthday! I am 85 years old or at least working on it. How can that be, you ask. You were just 83 the last time we looked. This is my way of looking at it.

Years ago, I read somewhere that the Chinese way of looking at age is that when you are born you are not counted to be one year old until you have completed that year. Therefore your birthday is always behind by one year. You follow? So when you get to your birthday, you have been working on that year all the time before and therefore you have finished that year and are starting a new one. So this next year I shall tell everyone I am 85 and then when my birthday comes again I won’t feel so bad because I have been that age for a whole year already. Is that nuts? My kids think so.

There seems to be also something in my memory bank about how they also count the 9 months in the womb some way. Some of you won’t like that. You are already older than you think. Bad. Well, age isn’t such a bad thing. You cannot stop time and although I would like to go back, as does everyone I think, one cannot. So you accept it and enjoy each day you can.

There are a lot of misconceptions about old agers. One that I always debunked when I was teaching school was to tell the kids that just because someone is old does not mean they are wiser. If they were stupid when they were young, they are just as stupid when they get old. Harsh? Perhaps, but wisdom does not come automatically with experience and long life.

This post came out of the blue. I did think of a topic yesterday as my son and I were driving home from Appleton after a brief shopping trip. But I forgot what it was and he can’t remember it either, so there you go. It probably will come back to me sometime. So for now, this is it.