Happy 80th, Grannie. I can’t wait for mine.

My Grandma Bonnie turns 80 this month. I’m looking forward to driving back home to Missouri for the party in her honor, and also to the day when I’m 80 myself. One of my favorite novelists, E. Annie Proulx, once told an interviewer that, as she aged, she became pleasantly invisible. Sidling up next to people in diners or bars, no one paid much attention to the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer—which meant she could observe them and take notes however she liked. “This is great, this is great!” she told the New York Times in 1994, at age 59. “Especially when your main desire in life is to find out things and overhear.”

No one wants to be invisible all the time. In fact, I love walking down the street in Asheville feeling like I know many people and they know me. But I am looking forward to aging as gracefully as my grandma, and Annie Proulx, too. Bonnie has lived in Missouri all her life but traveled far and absorbed much, whisking me away to Israel when I was 7 and flying with my sisters to New York City when she was 70 and I was 22. She is in nearly perfect health, which she attributes to lots of black coffee and prayer.

I just celebrated a birthday in late July, and a few other close women friends, including VERVE’s Laura Miklowitz, celebrate late-summer birthdays. Happy birthday, all you Leos. Rather than dreading birthdays in my 30s, I’ll start looking forward to 80, when I can only hope to be as healthy, wise and well-read as my friends.

Jess McCuan

jess@vervemag.com