Another Day

Perhaps all of this speculation about autobiography with which I have recently been concerned has made me somewhat reticent to acknowledge my passing birthdays. I mentioned the day in passing in a post from August 2013 and can find no reference to it at all in 2014. In 2012 I acknowledged my 65^th year. I do not know how to record the day other than to simply mention its presence; its events are mundane, of course, because it is only another day, in fact. It interests me that in the index of the complete journals of Henry David Thoreau there is not a single entry marked ‘birthday.’ In all of his writing Thoreau did not make reference to his birthday, and so of course there is no place to go to discover an explanation for the silence. But I suspect that for Thoreau the anniversary of the day of his birth was not unlike every other day of his life: Walden closes, ”Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” And thus, his birthday required no notice different from any other day of the year: every day was a day of birth.
          Today on my birthday I think of Seymour Glass. In his diary he wrote, “I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” So I’ll recognize the Birthday and I’ll avoid the Happy.