Dear Michael,
Happy, happy birthday!!!!! The forties are wonderful years! Well-except for the strange body shape-shifting thing. As a matter of fact, you are really just approaching the wonderful decade when the sharp judgmental edges of youth are softened by the years of experience. You now become a person of wisdom, not just learning, of compassion rather than sentimentality. Now you step back from the subjective opinions of your early years and embrace the wonderful diversity of us all with understanding and appreciation..
Enough of that..Have I convinced you not to get drunk and mourn your lost youth? No? Yeah---it didn't work for me either. I cried for the week before my fortieth. Oddly, fifty bothered me hardly at all. MAybe that's because my brain has begun to deteriorate and I'm sliding into the twilit years of senility. But at least I'm very happy.
Forty is NOTHING--pshaw~ I spit upon 40! You have your hair! Your waistline! I've seen pictures!! You look 30. You have only just begun!
(I'm doing my Karen Carpenter imitation now, minus the anorexia)
ANd if you don't look back at fifty and think how little you knew at forty, then you will have wasted the years!!!! THink of all that living to come, and knowledge to gain! It is exactly the feelings you expressed last night that say how well you are using your life! How awful to still think as if you were twenty! TO view death from that angle, to see love in that shallow way, to measure your life by the standard you held then!
Have a wonderful day--have a wonderful year! Have a wonderful decade!
Love, penni |
