I want to thank everyone for the kind words, good wishes and gold bullion you sent me yesterday for my birthday!

     It’s not easy turning 30, you know. Your expressions of love and friendship helped me get over the hump.

     “So what’s the secret to being old?” the younger generation asks.

     “Well,” I tell them, “Every day, come rain or shine, whether I feel like it or not, I strive to do something silly.”

     “You can’t be serious.”

     My point exactly. And if you can’t do something silly, try for goofy or carefree – anything, in short, to avoid mature adult behavior, which will kill you in a hurry.

     It’s very obvious what the kids are trying to show us, day after day: how to live in the moment and have fun, thereby averting the ravages of age.

     Kites … hula hoops … bubble pipes … silly putty … knock-knock jokes. It’s all good. If you can’t remember how to do these things, ask a kid to show you.

     Just yesterday, for example, I had the extraordinary pleasure of watching my friend’s grandsons, ages 5 and 7, play hopscotch. Regrettably, I arrived too late to join the game. Instead, I borrowed some of their colored chalk (it’s available in rainbow colors now) and became a celebrated sidewalk artist.

In fact, our art was so spontaneously cool, I decided to go back this morning and snap a photo. Alas, the rain had washed it all away. Now if that’s not a metaphor for life and how we ought to live our days, then I’ve never seen one.

     That game was for yesterday’s silly. Today merits something new.

     So you see, the poets and songwriters have been right all along. Age isn’t so much a condition of the body as it is an attitude of the mind.