Young At Heart

I was talking with an Itipini student the other day whose English is reasonably good. She asked me why I wasn’t in school and I said I was too old for school. She said, “Too old? You don’t act serious enough to be old!”

I wished I had the Xhosa vocabulary to explain, “you have to grow older but you don’t have to grow up” or explain the concept of “young at heart.” But I don’t so I just laughed and laughed. It was the best thing anyone has said about me in a long time.