During my lunch break, I walked over to the library to return a book. I walked through a park and saw two big groups of children playing. They must have been 5 or 6 years old. And I thought – it’s conceivable that some of them could live into the 22nd century. There are undoubtedly people alive today who will live until at least the year 2100.

There are times when I find myself thinking, wow, I’m 31 years old? I remember when 30, let alone 31, seemed OLD. Old old. So often I live in the present – or at least in the present phase of my life, i.e. Newark and New York City in the first decade of this century – that I forget the other lives I’ve lived in the past. A high school student in Japan. A college student in Virginia. A little kid in the suburbs. Wow, I’ve lived a lot so far.

I will turn 80 in 2053. I hope I manage to live until at least the halfway point of this century. It would be nice to live even into the 2060s. Of course, by then, barring unforeseen (albeit likely) technological advances, I’ll be a doddering old fool, out of sync with the times, just like how Miss Daisy seems much more suited to those big elegant 1940s Buicks than those ugly early 1970s cars. The kids will be cyberporting around with their identity chips in their heads, and I will be old and lost, pining for the old pre-millennial days, while people laugh at me.

Hopefully, in the 2000s and 2010s and 2020s and 2030s and 2040s and into the 2050s, lots of great stuff will have happened over my lifetime to make it all worthwhile.