I'm not a big fan of the birthday, at least not mine. Not because I fear getting older ----- I actually kind of like that. I'm far more comfortable inside my skin now than I ever was back when it fit better.
No, first of all, birthdays kind of annoy me because they don't really mark what we think they do. I was born on August 24, 1950. (By the way, as birthdays go, that's a good one, especially the 1950 part. Makes it so easy to figure out all other dates.) But that was just the day I was born, not the day I started.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not some google-eyed anti-abortion terrorist determined that life begins sometime before conception. But when you get launched into the world and you're a full-fledged, breathing person, it'd be nice to get some credit for surviving all that cell division, and growing of fingers and toes, that went on in the womb. That's not nothing. So we already start out 9 months behind, give or take. Then we've got to put in a whole 'nother 365 before we even get to the big ONE. Somehow, that just seems wrong.
What all this amounts to for me is that in 2015 I'll turn 65 (see how easy that math is? I love 1950!) and that's supposed to be meaningful in much the same way that turning 21 is ---- it marks an artificial milestone that translates into describable, sometimes legal, changes. Everybody knows that when you turn 21 you can drink (wink wink) and you're considered an adult. Similarly, when you turn 65 you can go on Medicare. You also get all kinds of discounts, like with airlines and gym memberships, and people automatically put you in the category of OLD ----- or elderly or senior citizen or, my personal favorite, a golden-ager. You know who really thinks you're old, besides grandchildren? Car rental companies. Some don't even want to rent cars to people over 65. Huh! Why Sonny, I've been driving since stick shifts were everywhere and seat belts didn't exist!
Since Mom died, I've been in touch with a lot of people from my previous lives. It's an interesting process. First of all, I don't think I'm that much different, so why do all these people have gray hair (or bald heads!) and grandkids and social security? I still think that me being able to collect SS is some sort of scam I'm pulling --- surely I'm not old enough for retirement, right? All of my notions about time and life-span are up for grabs right now. I suppose it's a perfectly predictable life passage that happens just about now, but it's MY life passage and it's a novelty to me. How can life go by so quickly? How can I feel so new when, chronologically speaking, I'm sliding down the far end of the bell curve?
I'm reading about brain chemistry and neurology, creativity and consciousness. I'm also re-reading Agatha Christie to give those neurons a break from trying to find hooks on which to hang new learning. I get the butterflies in the tummy with excitement when I make new connections, understand something that had never been clear before. I clench my teeth and read some paragraphs over and over, almost feeling the reach of dendrites as I try to grasp something new. Wears me plum out!
When I was 30, I first noticed that the skin on my hand was loosening up. I was appalled. I kept poking at the back of my hand like it was a dead mouse, fascinated and horrified. Thirty-five years later, with far more loose skin, I assure you, I see my mother's hands, the hands of my grandmother ---- wrinkled, veiny, age-spotted ---- and I love them. They're not new, they've been used to work and play and dig in the dirt and hold babies and make love and open jars. They've been surgified several times, rehabilitated, puffed up and shrunk down.
At Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh (UUFR) my favorite part of the child dedication ceremony is the call to 'use these hands in the work of the world.' I have done that and, most recently, in the care of my mother in her last days. As we gathered around her bed, and the world fell away, it felt like a death and a birth, rolled into one.
That is new learning for me.
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