19 de Janeiro

It's my birthday, and so, well, here's a song composed in honor of the day.  It's part of a vast work composed by Brazilian jazz legend Hermeto Pascoale, Calendario do Som, in which he created a delicious lilting ditty for every day of the entire year.  Why?  So everyone would have a birthday song, of course.

It was delightful to find, particularly given the existential insignificance of turning fifty seven.  Sixty?  That's a Birthday.  Fifty five?  Also a Birthday.  But fifty seven is neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl.  It's a grey and liminal thing, marking an in-between place, becalmed in the fogged doldrums of deep middle age. 

Not that I mind, not at all.  It's a pleasure to still be drawing breath, to enjoy the blessings of creation around me, the soft quiet of hours spent reading and the good company of friends and family.  

I write this shipboard, in the lap of ease.  For the last hour, I've been out on a veranda overlooking the rolling ocean, reading Zola's Germinal as eight foot swells rock the ship and I give thanks for dramamine.  It's the fourth and final book I brought with me on this trip, and it's more engaging than I'd anticipated.  Immersed in that desperate, carnal tale of the lives of coal miners in the late 19th century, the dissonance between their brutish, desperate labors and my own comfort is as jarring as a Ligeti Requiem ringtone.  

Today may not be any particular thing, but I'd have to be delusional not to appreciate the fifty seven seasons of my own good fortune and happenstance.  These last near-sixty decades have been good ones, with more days filled with song than not.

Take enjoyment of your days, counsels the One Who Assembles, and I shall enjoy this one with gratitude.

One Year Shy of the Meaning of Life

Forty One, eh?

I am not, even by Presbyterian standards, a youngling any more. This strikes me as peculiar. Now and again, I'll be sitting around with a group of adults, and will suddenly realize that people who seem very much grown up and responsible are actually considerably younger than I am. Or I'll be talking with a grownup about a subject on which I'm apparently expected to know something. I'll listen to myself speak, and think, "Wow! I really do seem to know what I'm talking about. How did that happen?" I'm not sure if this happens to other people.

Shouldn't I feel different? I realize, when I think about it, that the array of data that underlies my awareness of the world around me is rather more deeply layered than it was when I was seven.

I know how to do a whole variety of things that would have baffled myself thirty-four years ago. I now know how to type, for example, which is making posting this a whole bunch easier. I'm married, which has contributed a whole bunch of of highly entertaining memories that my seven-year old self probably shouldn't be exposed to. I've got the boys, and a modest house in the burbs, which I apparently own. My body is larger, and increasingly creakier. I've been through all manner of joys and experienced some pretty impressive pain. Yet though those experiences add some...complexity of flavor...to my self, the awareness that I'd describe as "me" really is the same "me" that it has always been.

I'm always a bit confused when I encounter people I used to know who have been radically changed by the process of life. I find myself wondering, who are you? What happened to that person I knew? Sometimes that new person is actually rather nicer than the old one, which is a good thing. Sometimes, that new person is closed and embittered and more selfish, which usually makes me really miss the person I knew before.

But I remain, at least to my own discernment, basically me. Which is what I plan to be for as long as I am.

It makes aging seem sort of irrelevant, or at a bare minimum, not something worth worrying about. Then again, it's nice to have the birthday wishes and the cake and the presents.