A little thing I made for a high school assignment.
Thank you for coming here today, be you friends or family, a colleague or a neighbour, a guest or a stranger.
I want to thank my family—both those of my blood and the people that I found along the way—for having lived alongside me and advised me through all my decisions, both good and bad.
I want to tell a story about how I met 80.
80 is a number that seemed so far into my future that it would never arrive. When I was 17, 80 was a world away. At 30, it felt closer, but only by a little.
At 50, 80 was on vacation in some exotic country, but it wrote to me, promising he would return soon.
At 70, it moved into a house just down the block. This morning, 80 rang the doorbell and waited outside for me to answer.
I let him in. He hung his coat on the hook by the door—a wrinkled, old, ugly thing that went out of style, like, 40 years ago—and put away his umbrella by the table, right next to the portraits of my grandchildren.
We had some tea and chatted for a while. 80 had a lot of things to say, but most of them were about the past—his career as a doctor, his old dreams of being an artist and a writer, his retirement and being a lazy golfer. 80 lived in the days before yesterday. He seemed to have forgotten that he had a future.
80 told me that 90 would be visiting soon—100 would come too, if I was lucky. I asked 80, “But then what?” He just shrugged. 80 claimed to have all the answers, but he didn’t really seem to have one in that moment.
That made me laugh. When you tell people that you’ve turned 80, they look at you with a weird expression—like being old is a disease you caught in a foreign country, or a punishment that you got for doing something wrong. But it’s just the opposite.
People think that being old means your life is over. They’re more wrong than they think.
Experiencing new things at 17 was more enjoyable than when you were 10–20 was better than 30, 40 even more than that, and on and on.
It is impossible to have done and seen everything in the world, whether you’re 80, 100, 200, or 1000! Being old means that when you see something new, you get more excited than ever!
As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus says: “Everything changes, and nothing stands still.” Not even old people. As I turn 80, I look forward to turning 90, 100, and beyond. I am more excited for life than ever before—in that way, I’m younger than ever.
Thanks for coming. Enjoy the cake.