One

Lately, if you ask my daughter how old she is, she answers, not incorrectly, “one.” This in and of itself astounds me as she she’s been doing this since 14 months of age. But I’m even more wowwed by her other answers to age questions. When I ask, “How old am I?” she replies, “one.” When I ask how old mommy is, she replies, “one.” And so on and so forth. But it’s made me rethink the idea of age; in some ways, we’re kind of all one year of age. Humans are newbies on this planet, just seconds old compared to other, more funky, lifeforms like horseshoe crabs. And we’re all pretty close in age in the great scheme of things. My grandmother died at 92, which I grant you is 91 years older than her great-granddaughter; but really, it’s a short amount of time, a blip in the universal wristwatch and I tend to think that all our time on this planet is compressed at the ripe age of “one.” We’ll always be one, as the Kabbalists have noted long before I.