Happy Birthday, Leah:

Congratulations on getting a year older.

Here's what happens, when you get really, really old,
say, sixty-five years older than you are now:

You wake up in the morning and discover that you have forgotten
what you did with your shoes when you took them off the night before.
So you stumble around the house, looking for your shoes, your feet
getting colder and colder on the cold floor. Your cold, cold feet 
tell you, you had better get find socks before your cold feet get
any colder. So you go to the bureau drawer and find two socks
which seem to go together, although when you look closely, they
don't really match; but, you say to yourself, what does it matter,
because nobody is going to look at your feet anyway, and besides
the socks will be pretty much hidden in your shoes. So now your feet 
aren't quite so cold, and you can look for your shoes some more.
And you find them! Sitting on a clean chair where they're not
supposed to be, and you're glad you saw them there before your 
grandmother did. And inside the shoes is a pair of really really
clean socks. And you feel foolish just having gotten another clean 
pair out of the drawer. You decide you had better take the socks
off again and put them back in the drawer, so they will be there
for tomorrow, and put on your feet the socks that you pulled out
of the shoes.  You take the pair of socks that you've just taken off
back to the bedroom to put them back in the bureau drawer,
but when you get there, you see that the bed needs to be made,
and you start to make the bed. Then you notice the socks in your hands,
and you realize you have forgotten what you actually came here for
in the first place.  And then you remember, and you put the socks
back in the drawer, and you feel good about yourself because you
corrected a mistake.  You've forgotten all about the fact that
you were going to make the bed. You've forgotten why you came here
in the first place.  You notice that the floor seems very hard,
and you notice that you don't have any shoes on. So you remember
that you were going to put on your shoes; and you remember that
you just found them with the socks tucked inside, but you can't
remember where it was that you found them. And then suddenly,
it occurs to you that today is Leah's birthday and you forget
all about the shoes, and you decide that even though your feet
are getting cold again, before you forget it, you want to
send her a Happy Birthday letter that nobody but you could write,
because nobody but you feels the way you feel about Leah.
But you don't know what to say. So you sit down at the computer
and scratch your head where the hairs used to be...

And this is what happens when you get really really old.

                                                 Yoyo