Sarah would have turned 40 today.

As her birthday comes right on the heels of Christmas, Sarah always felt that she had been cheated out of her due. The whole fam damily would come together for nearly everyone else’s birthday, but after the holidays, everyone was just too burned out to muster another celebration. So I always tried to make her birthday extra special. One year, I took her to see the Broadway touring production of Footloose. Man, that was a stinker, but she loved it. I can’t imagine what I would have done for her 40th. Chances are she would have talked me into going to Churchill, Alaska, to visit the polar bears.

I was born a couple of years after Sarah. I am now officially pushing 40, and it is a strange feeling indeed. My son is five already; I’m on my third car. I can get an e-mail from someone I went to high school with, and say with complete accuracy that I haven’t heard from them in twenty years. And our handsome cat, who shares Sarah’s birthday, moves from “mature” to “old” today.

Figaro is 13 years old, by my reckoning. I got him when he was two. My neighbor, Liz, banged on my apartment door and thrust him into my arms. “Congratulations, you just got yourself a cat. The little bastard keeps trying to kill my kitties.” It took a while to train him not to climb inside the Doritos bag whenever it was opened, but we quickly learned to understand each other. He and I have been together for eleven years now. He recently spent a few days in the hospital, having eaten a bit of ribbon. The Christmas Turd used up one of his nine lives and cost me a cool $1200. I hated being put in this position, but I had to decide just exactly how much money I was willing to spend to save his furry behind, before giving him the needle.

It seems he will recover, but it got me to thinking. 13 is pretty old, for a cat. He may have made it through this time, but eleven years have passed awfully quickly. It will not be nearly that long before I can expect him to start peeing in difficult-to-find places around the house. He’s had a good, long life, and I wouldn’t want to see him suffer. He wouldn’t understand chemotherapy, for instance. Cats live in the now.

Which is my point, as it turns out. I wasn’t sure I had one, but I do. Sarah’s life was cut short, but even a hundred years is really not that long… and once you make it over the top of the hill and start down the other side, it goes faster and faster.

Live in the now, at least once a year. Celebrate your birthday. Visit the polar bears.

And don’t eat any more ribbon.