Poems About Turning 80

There is no room for eighty candles, so the family negotiates. Eight large ones? One shaped like an eight, one shaped like a zero? She solves it herself: bring the cake without arithmetic. Bring the people who still laugh loudly. Bring the song in whatever key survives. At eighty, she says, I know what I am celebrating.

Time takes the things you thought were permanent. The house you grew up in has different curtains now. Someone else's shoes by the door. Someone else's mail on the counter. The kitchen smells like a stranger's dinner and the walls don't remember your height marks because someone painted over them without knowing they were erasing a childhood. Time takes the body you thought was yours. The knees that used to bend without commentary. The back that used to be a background actor and has now become the lead in every scene. Time takes people. Not all at once. First it takes their sharpness— the quick laugh, the rapid walk, the way they used to enter a room like a sentence that didn't need a verb. But time also gives. This is the part everyone forgets. It gives you the face you actually earned— not the one you were born with but the one that your life sculpted smile by smile, worry by worry, until it looked exactly like who you are. It gives you the ability to sit in a room without speaking and feel no obligation to fill the silence. This is wisdom. This is expensive. This costs decades. Time takes everything. But what it leaves is what was real. The decorations go. The foundation stays. And if you're lucky— and I think you are— what remains is enough to build the rest on.

I cannot set your cake down or straighten the candle leaning toward the window. So I send this small poem where my hands cannot go. Read it before the day gets busy: you are loved in this house, in your house, and in every mile between.