Voting for Birthdays
“Do you have a birthday coming up?”, I wrote. “Skipping it, thanks.”, my friend wrote back. Really? I find this hard to understand. Why would anyone skip an opportunity for birthday cake, balloons and the possibility of sparkly confetti? It’s not just the bright colors that make birthdays a delight. Every birthday is a chance to celebrate the lives of those we love, and even those we merely like! What makes them so fearsome to adults? Whatever you think about aging, it’s hard to argue for the alternative. Someone ought to caution us not to let the inexperience of youth inform our opinion of age. What treasures will the lucky ones find? What does a person know at 95 that she didn’t know at 55? Why decide we don’t want to be older before we...
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