On the eve of a big birthday,
I do what I always do.
I write.
Maybe that’s how I hold on to things
long enough to understand them.
It feels like yesterday
that I wrote Today I Turned 50.
And now—
sixty.
How the hell did that happen?
Sixty was my grandparents.
Then it was my parents.
It belonged to retirement, sensible shoes,
people who said things like, “At our age…”
And now somehow
it belongs to me.
The strange thing is,
you don’t wake up feeling sixty.
Your mind doesn’t suddenly become sixty.
It’s your body that starts making announcements.
The chin hair that appears overnight
with astonishing self-confidence.
The hands that used to be smooth
now show every year a little more clearly.
The skin that once felt like velvet
beginning to collect little marks of time.
The teeth shifting just enough
to make you look at an old photograph and think,
Wait. Wasn’t my bite perfect?
And the hot flashes.
Dear God, the hot flashes.
The sweating, the freezing.
The clothes going on, then off, then back on again.
Mother Nature isn’t easing you into anything.
She’s messing with you.
And yet inside, you’re still you.
You still notice a gorgeous young man
with a chiseled body and think,
Oh yes. Definitely my type.
Then arithmetic gets involved.
Mother.
Possibly grandmother.
Yikes.
But sixty isn’t only about what happens to your face,
or your waist, or your teeth.
It’s watching life change places around you.
The children who once needed you for everything
become people with keys, jobs, partners, plans.
There are Shabbat candles, crowded tables,
too much food, graduations, engagements.
A daughter standing in white
under soft California light,
looking so ethereal that for one second
you can see every version of her at once.
The child.
The student.
The woman.
There are people missing from those photographs too.
That’s part of sixty.
You become the caretaker
without remembering exactly when the roles reversed.
You learn hospitals.
You learn medications.
You learn how quickly a strong man can become fragile.
You hold your father’s hand
while his breathing changes
and realize that the thing you spent your whole life fearing
is now sitting in the room with you.
And somehow you’re not running.
That surprises you.
Your own strength surprises you.
Then comes the emptiness.
Then, almost absurdly close behind it,
the hills burn.
Smoke.
Blackened earth.
A landscape you know suddenly looking unfamiliar.
And you begin to understand
that life can change its shape
without asking your permission.
Homes change.
Marriages change.
People leave.
People die.
Children grow.
And somehow, in the middle of all that,
things still bloom.
You plant fruit trees.
You watch flowers come back.
You become a professional baker.
You start with Ilana’s A Cups—
cupcakes first,
playful and irreverent,
an idea pulled from somewhere in your younger self.
Then sugar becomes art.
Cookies become canvases,
and what starts at the kitchen table
grows into a cottage-food business,
tiny edible paintings
leaving the house in boxes.
And then comes chocolate—
darker, glossier, more sensual,
and The Dark Side begins to take shape.
One idea becoming another.
Sugar becoming art.
Art becoming business.
Business becoming something bolder.
Apparently, even now,
you’re still inventing
new versions of yourself.
You pull old screenplays
out of drawers.
And then there’s love.
At this age.
When you thought the great love story
was supposed to be behind you,
not waiting somewhere ahead.
Not companionship
or even convenience.
Not two people deciding
it’s better not to be alone.
Rather—
love.
The kind
that wakes something up.
The kind that makes you feel desired,
seen, listened to,
and somehow younger
without pretending you are.
You discover that history
isn’t the same thing as intimacy.
That thirty years beside someone
doesn’t automatically mean
thirty years of being understood.
Sometimes a person arrives later
and reaches you more quickly,
more honestly, more deeply
than you thought possible.
And suddenly all those old ideas
about who carries you into old age
start to look a little foolish.
Maybe love doesn’t care
how late it is, maybe it just arrives
when it arrives.
And perhaps that’s the part
that surprises you most—
that sixty can still contain
desire, tenderness, excitement,
and the delicious feeling
that something is only just beginning.
That may be the greatest surprise of sixty.
That beginnings still happen.
I don’t love getting older.
I’m not going to pretend I do.
Some experiences I’d erase.
Some losses I’d reverse.
Some chapters I’d happily tear out.
I don’t believe everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes awful things happen
and they remain awful.
But sixty does sharpen something.
Time.
You hear it more clearly now.
The screenplays in the drawer.
The places you still want to go.
The things you still want to make.
The words one day
start sounding dangerous.
At fifty, I worried about everything
I hadn’t accomplished.
At sixty, I still worry about time.
Maybe more.
But now I also know
I can survive more than I thought.
I can sit beside death, watch a landscape burn,
I can lose, then begin again.
I can love again!
I can still make something beautiful
out of absolutely nothing.
So here I am.
Sixty.
Not entirely thrilled about it,
or afraid of it either.
But here I am—
still writing,
still wanting,
still becoming.
And maybe that’s the strangest part.
You spend half your life thinking
sixty means you’ve arrived somewhere.
It doesn’t.
You’re still on your way.