Hey, They Say it's Your Birthday. Well, it's My Birthday, Too.

I don’t know that birthdays are all that important the older I get. I suppose they ought to become more significant, because there are less celebrations to anticipate in the future. I should savor these birthdays more! I suppose. But I have for the past twenty or so years—perhaps more, I forget—immediately following the anniversary of my birth defined myself as the next numbered year. Tomorrow, I finish my 58th year, but Wednesday I begin my 59th year. I will think of myself as 59 years old. When the actual birthday rolls up next 16 August, well, I’ve been celebrating the event for the past year. It becomes a non-event. And then I’ll silently, though perhaps not gently, move into my sixtieth year.

Now, the children might anticipate the celebration. But it’s like this: when I was much younger—I mean much, much younger—and I followed the Mother’s Day Celebration with the Father’s Day Celebration, I wondered aloud when Children’s Day would be honored. And the response was always the same: “Every day is Children’s Day.” That’s how I feel about birthdays. Everyday is a day we celebrate my being alive—our being here now. I celebrate myself and sing myself every day. I want my children to learn to sound their barbaric yawps each day of their lives. I hope I’ve taught them something about that celebration. I do not want them to set apart one day and honor me, and then return the next morning to the average, daily non-celebration of my being alive. I’d rather the continuity of struggling with them as we grow up together than this false peace of the anniversary on the day I was born almost six decades ago.

And the cards and presents that suddenly appear from people whom I haven’t spoken to or heard from since last year, well, they seem like so many lost trees.

For years, on my birthday I’ve secluded myself for an hour or two and written a short assessment of my life. The older I get, the more studied the assessment becomes, and the more complex the thought process seems to be.

Tonight as I sit here dreaming, I hope for continued health, continued satisfaction in my work, and a visit from John Beresford Tipton’s emissary, Michael Anthony.