A Few Words About Birthdays

I'm supposed to be past the age where I give tinker's damn about birthdays, particularly my own (although if I wish to be around to see a few more of mine I must take care to not forget the birthday of the missus) but my attitude is that, for most people, birthdays aren't all that until you run out of them.  Well, not me.

I mean, yeah, they're great when you're a kid (at least theoretically; see below) and there are a couple of milestone birthdays that are alleged to be the bomb as you leave childhood behind: 16, 18, 21.   But then the milestones aren't such groovy ones.  Dirty thirty, oh lordy look who's forty, so on and so forth.  We're supposed to have this sense that after, say, twenty-five or so we've crested, and it's all on the downslope after that, and birthdays simply become signposts whizzing by on the way down to that long dirt nap.

Well.   Maybe so.  But you won't hear it from me.

See, Death is out there.   Stalking me, like that famous figure from John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samara".   Sooner or later, he'll catch up to me.  Sooner or later, I'll have had my last meal, my last really good roll in the hay, listened to my last song, read the last finely-wrought sentence, and then . . . Well, who knows?  I'm like Hamlet on that one.  "To sleep, perchance to dream?  Ay, there's the rub."

In the meantime, though, every birthday marks a marvelous occasion to raise two middle fingers to that grim reaping hardass.    My birthday is April 11 (double April Fools, sez I) and on that date every year since I was old enough to understand this stupid mortality crap, I have seized the opportunity to flip death the biggest bird I can manage.   Screw you, dark angel!

Of course, it's purest bravado.   I'm just as afraid of dying as anybody, or at least of dying painfully.   I don't want to go out like one of those schlubs from those godawful FINAL DESTINATION flicks.   (Speaking of, isn't any sequel to that movie lying through its teeth?  What part of 'final' do they not get?  "FINAL DESTINATION 14: WE REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME!)  I actually want to die wide awake, in full possession of my faculties, old and in bed.  I mean really, really old.   Two hundred years old, if I can manage it and if modern medicine will just get its act together.

But in the meantime, yeah, go sit and spin, Death.   Made it to another April 11,  so take that, you killjoy you.

The worst birthday I ever had was my twelfth.   I was in the Boy Scouts at the time, and we had a jamboree campout scheduled the weekend of my birthday.   My birthday present (a record player from the nearby TG&Y) was sort of whisked before me as I was herded out the door for the campout.   All I wanted to do was hole up in my room and play every record I owned (I must have had, I don't know, a whopping three.  One of them probably a Hall and Oates lp.  Saints preserve us.)   But no, instead it was a weekend of incredibly lame activities, in the cold, beginning with burned pancakes in the morning and cold hobo dinners in the evening.  (I know there are digressions sprouting up all through this like dandelions, but I have this weird idea that there's no way kids could call those foil-wrapped culinary concoctions 'hobo dinners' anymore.  Too insensitive. )   And when I say cold, I mean it.   A late cold front plowed through the night before the jamboree, and our night there, it got down to around 8 degrees.   Yay.  Happy birthday to me.  

My best birthday?   Aw, man, that's tough.   My 18th was pretty good.  A hotel room with a bunch of friends, it wasn't as lame as it sounds.  

My 21st was spent at the old Bobo's restaurant in Stillwater pounding down two-for-one margaritas, which led to me and the missus . . . well, that's really none of your business.  (Okay, we sang silly Tears For Fears songs on the walk home.  There,  you happy?)

On my 40th, I finally got around to making a grendel.   This is a drink that was invented by Marillion, one of my favorite bands back in the eighties, and it was kind of a rite of passage for those who wanted to be allowed to hang with the guys in the group.   If you could knock back a couple of these and remain upright, you were in like Flynn.   It's an expensive drink to make, which is how, on the night they were signed to EMI Records, they were almost dropped from the label the very same night when the label reps got the bar tab.   Seems buying several rounds for all in the Friar's Club nearly put the label in the red.  I know making a few for my good friends damn near bankrupted me.

Next year?  Hell, who knows?  Maybe I'll get a wild hair and take up scuba.   Fifty's coming.   Maybe I'll get an even wilder hair and take that trip to Antarctica I've long threatened to do.  

Flipping off Death the whole way.