The Yawn Of A Plus One

Well, here it is, 51.  I liked 50.  I hate to see it go.  For me, turning fifty was a consummate delight, and not much has changed from fifty to fifty-one to justify a sense of the sort of low-grade ennui that settled in this year.  -So it doesn’t make sense really, but that is the way so many things are, -occurring only between the ears.  I suppose it is all just my sub-conscious rising up to let me know that the honeymoon is over and that I am making headway into the new decade.  The new car feel of the new decade has worn off.  There is sticky, dried cola and loose change in the center console, and it is time to vacuum out my psychological ride.

Online articles about birthday blues suggest that the feeling is not uncommon.  I think most of us have had at least one birthday that we would have just assumed had gone unobserved.  In fact, I am grateful having done a little research that my experience was so short-lived.  Some folks have a month long lead up and subsequent decompression and depression from turning a year older.  That would have been excessive for me.  Mine lasted little more than a day.  Whereas on my fiftieth, I was damn near turning cartwheels like a kid turning ten who can finally ride his bike beyond the corner stop sign, at fifty-one I very much just wanted to be left alone having made the deliberate choice to avoid social contact on a day I might have claimed as mine.  That’s not very like me, -to go underground.

This year I worked on my birthday which when I was a kid seemed impossible to reconcile with the idea of a birthday experience.  I was born in the summer, so I never even had to contend with going to school on my birthday.  For the first seventeen or eighteen years I was conditioned to believe even in my emotionally lukewarm household that my birthday might very well be a national holiday or at least the world knew enough to not impose itself on me.  The experience probably did me a disservice in forming expectations.  One learns through the college and early years of adulthood to let go of this sense of terminal uniqueness, that the world marches on with or without an observance, and we grow up our ideas about what a realistic expectation should be for a day childhood teaches us indulges self-centeredness.  Project deadlines, bills, and household chores are poor respecters of the idea that we should get a 24-hour pass from life’s responsibilities and whatever shock we might feel in those first few adult years when adult life hits us in the face ultimately fades over time as we settle into a right-sized reality about life in general and this event in particular.

Before I go any further, I should point out at the risk of overselling any ideas of disappointment that I am married to a woman who has never failed to bury me in little demonstrations of birthday observances, and when I say “little”, I do not mean they are small in the effort exerted.  Rather she manages to remember even the little things to make it a special day.  I’ve only come to appreciate the effort through the passage of time having assembled an understanding of what must be an operation of almost military precision and planning sometimes beginning weeks in advance.  I say that I’ve come to understand because I have tried and failed miserably to reciprocate the effort for my wife’s birthday which is only three weeks after mine.  For one, I cannot bake to save my life.  Every year I am on the receiving end of some dessert masterpiece made in my honor not to mention the always deftly wrapped gifts that without fail either sate a frivolous longing for some doodad or address some current personal necessity only a person who really knew me could know existed.  It’s impossible to experience these gestures and not feel loved.  This has all rubbed off on the kids as well who even with limited funds always manage to do something to convey the same feeling.  Calligraphic, often humorous, birthday cards from my daughter probably take more time than anything else I receive, and I put them up to look at them throughout the entire year.                 

Following work the day of my birthday I went for a bike ride because I am cyclist.  I’ve logged some 35,000 miles since taking up the practice in my forties, so I kind of lean toward the serious side of it.  I headed out as I quite often do on any day when the weather permits.  -But a birthday bike ride can be a treat when it might only be exercise on any other day.  I left the office just a little earlier than usual, and I knew once I got rolling I had the freedom to stay out a little longer than I might on any other day.  My daughter, Keagan, returned to college that morning, so the official family festivities had already been observed the prior weekend.  I had nowhere to be, carte blanche for a few hours, and I could ride until the sun went down if I had wanted.  The idea of what makes for a treat changes as we get older, and for me sometimes the treat exists in the ability to become lost and unreachable.  It’s probably why I was so slow to hop onboard the cellphone craze.  I enjoy a capacity for not being found.

I made an impromptu water stop at my son’s new apartment.  His new place which is just this side of a dump is both testimony to his independence and drive to make a life for himself as well as a source of gnawing concern for me as his father as I have not quite made up my mind yet about the part of town in which he lives.  Reaching his place and sharing my hard to pinpoint take on the arrival of my birthday, my son, Emerson, who can be a surprising source of insight for a man of his early twenties, said with sanguine comfort, “Well, you know, you have to consider the year in which you are turning fifty-one.”  Hoorah for the boy who snapped me out of it.  Speaking from a lone computer chair in the middle of his living room where one might expect to find and as yet acquired second hand couch, he was of course referring to the ongoing pandemic which has settled like a fog over everything everyone is doing.  -But aside from this I was immediately calmed by from whom this feedback was coming.  There I was sitting in the company of a man of decency on whom I may have had some influence in bringing about and the surroundings in which we sat only added to the appeal of the moment for there was a sense of ‘no’ sense of entitlement.  This guy was going to cut his own path, and the current spartan existence spoke to his commitment to his course.  It was hard to see anything other than an accumulation of virtues in front of me.

Absent was the snarky, wise-cracking pot shots of a teenager, but rather here was the cogent, engaged, sympathetic feedback one would hope to get from a really old friend, the kind who does more by reflecting who we are and echoing what we hope to be rather than simply co-signing our misguided notions. I emptied and filled and emptied and filled my water bottles as we talked school plans, politics, and the ongoing Avs season all the while reminded that it was for these building blocks of life that we live, escaping into the company of those we love and who love us back.  In the crowded hour of a water break sitting on a trunk that doubled as a coffee table, I was restored.