I turned forty today.

I turned forty today. Here’s a picture of me, not for posterity, but for vanity.

We do not write memento mori in birthday cards, but it’s always written in the sky and in the dust. We buried my cousin when he was thirty three. Age is not a guarantee or a safeguard or anything else except a gift. Some parents complain time is a thief, but this is not true. Time is not a thief; time is a gift we do not treasure as deeply as we ought.

My four-year-old woke up shrieking this morning, yelling, “The sun has turned its light on, and I do not know why!” It has been a dark January, and we forget the sun exists. We are arrogant, we are small, and “not as strong as we think we are.

We are frail.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made.🎵“

I have not done the things I thought I would, but I have been given more than I deserve.

I have not written a book. I have not returned to the land of my birth or seen again the dragons which guard the Ljubljanica, but I have tucked them all in my heart. I have tried and failed to unlock all the secrets of Cyrillic and have never been to China, but I have a daughter who laughs in Mandarin, and a son who prays for snow and sings while he builds the towers of old, all underneath this January sunshine.

Like the poet Elinor Wylie, “I cannot give you the Island of Capri”. It was never mine to give anyway. None of this is mine, not even this moment. Not even these words.

It’s all, like these forty years, a gift.