✎ September 4th, 2025
Today we drove out to see my grandmother.
She turned 101.
Still sharp.
Still kind.
Still driving herself to McDonald’s every morning for a breakfast sandwich and coffee with a drivers license she enthusiastically renewed within the past few years.
Still rocking on her porch, watching the sun rise and fall,
as if she’s on speaking terms with time itself.
She jokes that she doesn’t know why she’s still here.
As if the universe misplaced her.
As if death looked the other way and forgot to collect her name.
A century and a year,
a cosmic overtime.
And I sit with that.
What does it mean to inhabit a body for that long?
Is it a victory lap?
A sentence served?
A lesson still unfolding?
Or is it simply what happens
when the machinery of biology outpaces the mystery of purpose?
I’m 45, and already the body speaks its limits.
The joints complain.
The muscles carry fatigue like old friends.
I try to imagine 56 more years of managing this spaceship,
the slow narrowing of what the body allows,
and yet the slow widening of what the spirit sees.
Perhaps that is the secret of longevity:
the body shrinks,
but awareness widens.
Maybe that’s why elders laugh at life,
not because they’ve solved it,
but because they’ve outlived the illusion of solving it.
From the porch, my grandmother has watched
101 full cycles of the earth around the sun.
36,865 days.
Each one a bead on the thread of existence.
Each one a small eternity.
We count them as numbers.
She has lived them as breath.
What is the point of this whole human game?
Is time a ladder we climb,
or a wheel we keep circling?
Does the universe hand out extra years
as a punishment for stubborn souls,
or as a gift for those who still have something left to anchor?
When I look at her,
I don’t see an answer.
I see a mirror.
I see my daughters, Juliet, Phoebe, and Aurora,
gazing across the span of a century
into eyes that have seen the Depression,
world wars, the rise of technology,
the loss of countless faces,
including my grandfather more than 20 years ago,
and two of her three daughters.
And still—here she is.
Still breathing.
Still smiling.
Still confused about why.
Maybe that’s the hidden riddle of 101 years:
to stand at the edge of knowing
and admit that meaning is not in the number,
but in the noticing.
And so I bring it back home.
Maybe the point is not the mystery solved,
but the mystery lived.
The sandwich.
The McDonald’s coffee.
The bird on the wire.
The porch at dawn,
at dusk.
And the strange, quiet miracle
of still being here
to see it all again.
From my fire to yours.