Birthdays, Special Days, EveryDays, Just Days

Just a few days ago I passed the anniver­sary of my birth. It was one of those anniver­saries that many peo­ple think is a big deal. You know, one of the decades, one of those with a zero on the end. Still Here Too passed the same anniver­sary a cou­ple of months ago. Other than, in her words “once again being the same age as her”, we don’t dwell too much on the actual anniver­sary count. Just a few days after Still Here Too’s birth­day, our son’s birth­day passed. Just a few days before my birth­day passed, Still Here Too’s mother’s birth­day passed. We had the plea­sure of hav­ing her at our home to visit for the past nearly two weeks. Given that her birth anniver­sary count is nearly thirty more than ours and she is in amaz­ing health, it has been a joy­ous visit.

But I must admit that that actual occur­rence of these birth anniver­saries really does not mean much more than other days to me. To me, birth­days mean a lot when peo­ple are younger than legal age. And birth­days mean more the younger the per­son is. When peo­ple are very young, there is some much change and growth that each year is almost the start of a new life. As they approach late teenage this change slows, but is still con­tin­u­ing. Cer­tainly some­where between the very late teens and early twen­ties a person’s exact age stops becom­ing a dis­tin­guish­ing issue in their inter­ac­tion in soci­ety. Remove the legal dis­tinc­tion of being accepted as a “legal adult”, and a person’s exact age becomes immaterial.

What starts mat­ter­ing at this point is sur­viv­ing and liv­ing another day. Live through enough health crises, and this becomes really impor­tant. For the life of me I can­not under­stand those peo­ple how are truly crushed by turn­ing thirty or forty or any other “ty”. What the hell is dif­fer­ent from twenty-nine years, three hun­dred, sixty four days old ver­sus thirty years old? Thirty years and one day old just might turn out to be the best day of your life. Or maybe it will be seventy-four years and sixty days!

So for the peo­ple who are still here with us, I am just glad they are with us. For the very young peo­ple who are with us, I look for­ward to cel­e­brat­ing their birthdays.

But there are other birth­days that I always remem­ber. A few days after the pass­ing of the anniver­sary of my birth are the anniver­saries of my beloved father’s, mother’s and stepfather’s births (My father died while my mother was still rel­a­tively young. Sev­eral years after his death my mother met a won­der­ful wid­owed man. We are so glad she brought him into our fam­ily.) I find that this is a time that my mem­o­ries of them are renewed and strength­ened. These are my trea­sured birth­day cel­e­bra­tions for adults.

♦ Is Still Here