Birthdays keep happening, whether I want them to or not.
59 is damn close to 60. I know, intellectually, that there’s nothing special about a number with a zero at the end, even if that number is large. But 60 feels like a threshold, with all the superstitious weight of a liminal space — a transition to old age.
It’s bugging me, even though it’s still a year away.
I would be wise to live in the moment, though — “Sufficient unto the day,” and all that. This birthday is weird enough, what with a dumpster fire of a president (and, worse — if that’s possible! — a cadre of grinning enablers); a global pandemic, of which America is among the best at handling poorly; a perpetual Golden Hour, thanks to the smoke from all the fires (one of which had me on evacuation warning for a couple days); the weekly virtual Happy Hour with my English department colleagues, drinking alone together; and lots and lots of distance education.
Interesting times, as the probably-not-really-Chinese curse goes.
Nonetheless: the birthday wishes are pouring in through Facebook and texts and email, an important reminder, in these isolated times, that I do in fact have family and friends and colleagues. And I have collected a small but pleasant pile of cards and presents that arrived, mostly through snail mail, over the past couple of weeks, and which I will open after dinner tonight (such discipline!).
In the Before Times, dinner would have been at a favorite restaurant, the kids’ noses buried in their phones. Instead, I’m going to help the Younger cook a psuedo-Jambalaya (Jambalaya stew? soup? He likes to keep the rice separate…). It’s currently my favorite dish — at least, my favorite among dishes within my cooking skill set. And it will fulfill one of the Younger’s Advanced Culinary homework assignments.
I’m not sure what next year will be like. I don’t expect that the pandemic will have disappeared, though I hope we’ll be handling it better by then. And I’ll be surprised if we’re not again wrangling fires, given the accelerated Climate Crisis.
That said, I hope our world will be in good enough shape that the worst thing I have to think about is that Big Six-Oh.