• Tag Archives birthday
  • All Aboard

    Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

    Of course, it’s just a spot on the earth’s orbit around the sun.  The very spot where you or I slid out of the birth canal, or, in my case, were excised through the abdomen, kicking and bawling, with no clue about why the world had suddenly gone from watery and warm to non-viscous and cool.  No wonder we cry.

    (So, there I am, just a bit more than halfway between perihelion and the spring equinox.)

    And, it’s an extremely ordinary event.  I mean, everyone who ever lived–everyone–had one.  Certain cultures, I’m told, place no emphasis on the birthday at all and maybe they’re right, but the sentimentality of our way pleases me all the same.

    People call us and tell us they love us.  Are happy for us.  Gifts come.  Cards.  Smiles.  A feeling of particularity overshadows all else for at least one day.  Love gets concrete on birthdays.

    Advancing age makes me no less interested in celebrating this most ordinary of events which is, of course, supremely extraordinary in one important way:  it’s the only time this happened to me.  Or you.  66 is a good number.  So was 16.  26.  76.  The number says you’re still on board spaceship earth and punching your ticket for another full ride.

     

     


  • The Life Ahead

    Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

    So.  66.  Tomorrow.  How that long-haired, green book bag carrying, dope smoking political radical could be turning 66 is, I admit, a puzzle.  Yes, he looks a bit different in the mirror.  Well, ok, quite a bit different.  Instead of long hair, little hair.  Instead of the book bag, a kindle.  Not smoking at all.  Hmmm, still a radical though.  Guess the other stuff is detritus of past fashion.

    After passing the last great social milestone before the final one, that is, signing up for Medicare, my life has taken on a new cast.  I’ve written about it here, a change that came gradually but with a strange persistence.  That new cast has home, writing, Latin and friends as its core.  It entails reduced traveling into the city, a much lower profile in terms of volunteer work in either politics or the arts.  A word that sums it for me is, quieter.

    Quieter does not mean less energetic or engaged, rather it signals a shift in focus toward quieter pursuits:  more reading, more writing, more scholarship, more time with domestic life.  Unlike the pope I do not intend to give up my beloved theological writing. (Kate believes he’s suffering from dementia.)  I intend rather a full-on pursuit of the writing life, novels and short stories, a text on Reimagining Faith.  This full-on pursuit means active and vigorous attention to marketing.

    The primary age related driver in this change is greater awareness of a compressed time horizon, not any infirmity.  How many healthy years will I have?  Unknown, though I do actively care for myself.  Still, the years will not be kind, no matter what I do.  So, I had best get my licks in now, while I can still work at my optimum.

    So, the man turning 66 has a different life ahead of him than did the man turning 65.   An exciting and challenging life.

     


  • There and Back Again

    Lughnasa                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    A birthday really marks the spot on the earth’s orbit where you were born.  So, it is not necessarily a function of time in a linear sense, but the count of revolutions on the (roughly) same path.  In other words even the years of our lives do not, at least in this sense, refer to the passage of time so much as they do the passage of the earth around the sun.  I like this because it helps me have a concrete understanding of my years.  I have, for example, gone round the sun 64 times and am about halfway through my 65th.

    A space-time co-ordinate.  When we add in our linear sense of time, occasioned by the evident aging process that ends in death (entropy at work), our birthday becomes a space-time co-ordinate, fixing our birth in the 4-dimensional reality of space and time, or Minkowski space.   Our birth date locates not only the 3D version of our birth–the physical locus of our birth–but establishes a reference point in some standard measure of linear time.  In the West we tend to measure time in relation to a fixed point occurring around the birth of Jesus, but it could have as easily been the birth of Socrates or Alexander or Cleopatra.

    Linear time, as we measure it, has this odd pliability.  We have no fixed point in reality against which to mark its passage, unless you count revolutions around the sun; but, then we end back in the cyclical view of time, the type of time measured by the Great Wheel, because to indicate linear time we still have to agree on which particular revolution starts our series.

    How many revolutions ago was Caesar murdered?  How many revolutions ago was Confucius born?  How many revolutions ago did Homo sapiens emerge out of Africa?  We still have to place our tent peg, our starting point somewhere and it will still be in revolutions around the sun.

    No matter how hard we try to escape into chronological accounting, our human estimates still return to our revolutionary experience, the root source, which is, and always will be until we leave this planet for the stars, cyclical.


  • Happy Birthday, Kate

    Lughnasa                                                          Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    “Through the years, a man (sic) peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges

    As the sun retreated behind the spinning earth, Kate and I sat outside at Buona Sera, an Italian restaurant in Champlin.  There was an umbrella over our table and pit a pat from time to time fell acorns, the harvest of fall already underway.  Kate’s birthday itself is tomorrow, but she works, so we celebrated today.

    This is my 22 birthday celebration with her and I look forward to 22 more.  We met each other at a point where both of us needed some good luck.  We found it.

    There is something satisfying about a dinner with a long time friend, especially on an important event like the day of her birth.  She is a long time friend now and my long term love.  There is a sort of patina that gathers with age and repetition, perhaps akin to the wabi-sabi aesthetic of the Japanese.  After long use, an item, say a humble tea scoop or a water ladle, takes on the character of the one who scoops tea or ladles water with it.

    Our bodies, and our faces, are the same; so are the relationships most dear to us.  They take on the character of the two who create them, a lustre of careful attention and loving touch.

    As the sun set, we listened to the acorns, drank our coffee and enjoyed the patina of our life together.


  • Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me?

    Imbolc                                                 Waxing Bridgit Moon

    Iconic birthdays.    Sweet sixteen.  18-old enough to die.  21–when I was young, this was THE iconic birthday.  Ok to drink.  Woops.  A few years later I was an alcoholic.  Then for my generation there was 30.  We didn’t trust anybody over 30.  Uh-oh.  That came and went.  Then, 40.  40 was a big one because it was the time you might buy a red sports car, hunt for that trophy wife and make strange vocational decisions.  Close.  I met Kate, my wife who has been a wonder and a major Valentine ever since we got serious.  I made a strange vocational decision.  Got out of the ministry and in to writing.  Yes, there was, too, that little red sports car.  Bought it in 1994.  OK, I was 47, but hey.  Still driving it.  There was another major birthday for me, 46.  My mother died at age 46.  To pass your own mother’s age is a strange sensation, I imagine, at any age, but at 46, it seemed more than strange.  Sad. Painful. Happy to be alive.

    After those, 50 was not a big deal.  60 was 60.  I mean it’s a big deal in a way, but still, the only thing I felt was that I had passed into the new late middle age.

    But.  64.  Now that’s a biggy.  Wouldn’t have been I suppose if not for that Beatle’s song.  It managed to set a date for a change in attitude, a time when our life and love might change, might change so much that we would ask if we were still necessary to the people we love.  That’s too grim a statement for the light-hearted tenor of the song, but I think it did capture a fear resident in many a then 20+ years old heart at the time it came out:  what can life be like when we’re old?

    Those of us in the baby boom generation had created an entire culture around youth, rebellion, drugs and rock and roll.  Sgt. Pepper came out in June of 1967.  The summer of love.  Wearing flowers and heading for San Francisco.  How could acid-dropping, hard rock lovin’, anti-war, free love folks like us ever grow old.  When I’m 64 was like a time that would never come.

    Of course, no generation, at least none so far, gets to re-write the rules of aging.  We passed through our 20s, then our 30s, then 0ur 40s and 50s and have now begun to crest upon the shore of social security and medicare.  We have started to hit our mid-60’s.  As iconic ages go, of course, the big one for years was 65.  The finish line.  Throw away the work clothes, grab the gold watch and go golfing, then fishing, then drop dead.  Not now.

    We hit 64 and we’ve just begun to pick up speed.  It’s not an age; it’s a speed limit.

    Suddenly we’re here, many of us, and we realize that the song was written by youngsters.  It expressed their and our fear of moving on beyond the wonder of the sixties.  What would it be like?  What could it be like?

    I’m happy to report that it’s just fine.  Just as I told Kate, yes I still need you and yes I’ll still feed you; she tells me the same.  We have come a long ways from the days of the summer of love and the march on Washington.   Those were great days, so are these.  I’m happy to be 64.


  • So Ordinary. So Unique.

    Lughnasa                                   Waxing Artemis Moon

    Kate’s birthday has drawn to a close.  We spent part of the afternoon continuing to assemble her long-arm quilter.  This machine is big, a full 10 feet in length, large enough for a queen size quilt.  We have the base set up and need now to put on the rollers and mount the quilting sewing machine.  That’s the last step and she’ll be off to the races.

    In some ways birthdays are so ordinary.  Every one has them.  They commemorate a day, a particular spot in the earth’s orbit, when birth occurs.  Births are common; we’ve each been through at least one, the women among us sometimes many more than one.   People are common; there are billions of us.  Billions.

    At the macro level birthdays are ordinary.  But in the particular, in the idiosyncratic, in the once ever in all of history side to it, birthdays are downright unique, very special, celebrating the beginning of a life, a life that will never be lived again, will never be lived by anyone else.  So special.

    Take Kate, for instance.  There is no other person on all the earth, in all of history like her.  She’s a combination of genes, a lived history, a spark, a singularity.  She has a rare compassion, a keen mind, manual dexterity, dogged persistence, creativity and a talent for relationship.  I’ve been lucky that my own journey joined hers.

    Here’s to another 20 journeys around our Sol, maybe 25, for Kate and me.


  • Happy Birthday. Giggle, giggle.

    Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

    A red letter day here at chez Olson/Ellis.  Kate’s 66th.  She’s upstairs right now signing up for social security.

    We went out for breakfast this morning to Pappy’s, a place that already has a place in my heart.  It reminds me so much of Indiana, a part of it that I didn’t know I missed.  As a gift, I gave her a photo album of her ascent to grandmahood starting with a pregnant Jen and running up to the present.   She liked it.

    Being married to Kate these 20 years we’ve shared many birthdays and each one finds me more in love with her than the last.

    We had a waitress at Pappy’s that had a Fargo accent and ended each encounter with a girlish giggle. More coffee?  No?  Giggle, giggle.  Here’s the check, pay me when you’re ready.  Giggle, giggle.  Creeped me out.  Like having too much sugar in your coffee.  Hee, hee, hee.


  • Memorable

    Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

    Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.  Then stopped and put some pressure on.  Then stroked some more.  Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.  She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.  I’m feeling knot and kink free.  Massage clears out the mind as well as the muscles.  As Katie moved around my body, memories came flooding back.  Mom’s hands on my neck when I had polio.  The Alexandria 4-H county fair.  That afternoon in Bangkok when I let a tiny Thai woman loose on my just ruptured achilles, not knowing what it was.  Steel fingers and pain.  Lots of pain.  Then the night I stepped in the sewer grate while my body moved forward and my right foot stayed in place.  Body memories, unlocked by Katie.

    Memories have a fluid, slippery existence, just like Katie’s hands as she followed the process of my spine from neck to tail.  As I write about Mom and polio, an image of stuffing tissues into hardware cloth followed.  The float for homecoming for my class, seniors at last.  Being pulled away from that by who?  I don’t recall.  Then I was in Anderson, 9 miles away, at St. John’s hospital where my mother had been taken after collapsing while serving a funeral dinner.  After that the sculpted green plastic and aluminum tubing of waiting room furniture at Riley Memorial in Indianapolis.  Mom on a gurney, now 7 days after stroke, me riding with her as they took for an operation.  She reached away from me and said, “Son.”  The last words I heard from her.  The painful early morning talk with my father, should we remove the life supports?  Yes, we both decided.  Yes.  Then the funeral.  And the days and weeks and months after where I failed to integrate mom’s death as a powerful life lesson and instead took it as an emotional blast that rocked my very foundations.

    Bangkok, stumbling away from the 7-11 and the amulet stand in front of it, hurrying to get to the ATM.  Traffic making me anxious, not careful.  Blinding pain, yet running anyway because of the traffic, the cars.  All the traffic and the cars.  The night air humid as the flashing neon of Chinatown bathed the sidewalk in alternating colors, like the northern lights.

    As I know, we change our memories each time we access them, so all of these events, crucial as they are to my story, may not represent the truth at all, at least not the veridical, the actual truth.  But, in a more important way, they are the most truthful of all since they are the truth that has shaped my response to all these things and the thousands more accreted over the years of my life so far.  Even my account of the massage, who knows how close it is?  Yet the feeling lingers.  Good.  Feeling.


  • Dinner with the Kids

    Imbolc                                   New Moon (Wild)

    Kate and I went into the city to Azia for my birthday dinner.  An Asian fusion place, it has an interesting menu filled with crossover items like kannon steak and potatoes and an omakase (trust) sushi/sashimi meal.

    The food was good, but the main thing we both noticed was that this kind of night time dining in the city is not our scene anymore.  I mean this quite literally.  We had a good 15 to 20 years on everybody–diners and staff–in the place.  It was fun to see that whole aspect of life that was so crucial when we were younger.  Reminds me that there are always couples out on the town, others in elementary school, some suffering through middle school.

    As we pass out of life’s phases, we often leave them behind, no longer staying in touch with pre-school or college, say, once we enter the work-a-day world.  American society tends toward age segregation, a phenomena self-induced for the most part.

    A good birthday, 63 trips around the sun done.  Or, as I heard on a TV show, “One year closer to the sweet release of death.”  Cheery thought that.


  • Turning 63

    Imbolc                            New Moon (Wild)

    “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”- Franz Kafka

    It’s not an especially significant birthday in the way of things.  63 is a lull between OMG I’m in my 60’s and 65, the all purpose retirement age in former times.  The lack of symbolic significance and its very ordinariness makes me happy to turn 63.  I have no expectations about life at 63.  So far, the 60’s have been kind to me.  I’ve lost no friends, no family.  With the exception of Kate’s back trouble, no one I know has a serious ongoing health problem.  Frank Broderick who at 77 is now in his 15th year after his first heart attack manages his cardio problems, proving that even yesterday’s fatal condition can now fit into a long life.

    (Rembrandt self-portrait at 63)

    Turning the prism one more  time 63 astonishes me.  Why?  Because of its very ordinariness and because of its lack of symbolic significance.  Not so long ago, say when I was in my teens, folks my age had begun to teeter toward a time of serious old age and disability.  That point in life is still not on the observable horizon for me.  In fact, it’s possible some number of us reaching this age will be relatively healthy and able until our final days.  Quite a change.

    On a personal note I have made my peace with the world in terms of success.  What I’ve had, little but some, will do.  I enjoy the love of a good woman and five dogs here at home and the circle  expands to nuclear family and extended family and friends like the Woollies, the docents and the Sierra Club folks.  My days have meaningful labor that changes with the seasons.  I live in a country I love, a state, and a home.

    Intellectually and creatively, it seems, I’ve just begun to come into my own, which means there are satisfying frontiers still ahead.

    Then there is Kafka.  Kafka.  What an odd and yet appropriate quote from  him.  He knew with fine detail the absurdity of modern life, yet he  found aesthetics central to a life of real engagement.  Me, too.