Adding Up

They say it’s my birthday. Well, happy birthday to me.

Gee-wiz, I gotta admit: the last few birthdays have been let downs. I’m starting to see why large parties on your fiftieth birthday might feel like a horrible exercise in social graces and personal hells. The luster and novelty of the whole birthday thing has worn off – partly because I can’t find any toy or experience to make this day stand out from the rest of the year. Use to be, I’d get all fired up and excited about the prospect of scoring some great new video game or dinner out. Unfortunately, by this time in my life I’ve had enough birthdays to realize they’re just one of many … nothing to get too hurried and bothered about. Besides, I’ve also moved beyond any of the birthdays that have any social value or benefits such as driving, gambling, being drafted or getting lower rates on insurance. I guess the next one to shoot for is AARP.

Part of the thrill of childhood birthdays is all your friends and family are there on your big day. Everybody has the chance to gather with you and see you blow out the candles and open gifts. Well, quite frankly, when you grow up that just isn’t a reality anymore. All those friends and family get going in their own paths, and so birthdays have this incredible power to remind you of community and your growing separation from the nostalgia that was. Call it the Wonder Years affect; I can almost hear some narrator in my head lamenting my fifteenth birthday as the kids filed out of my house and into the dark suburban night. He is saying something like, “I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last birthday where we were all together. That next year, my sister would go off to college, my stepfather would lose his life, and friends I had since elementary would start running with different crowds. From that point on, it was more like blowing candles out one by one, and each year it took a little more breath to get through the next.”

Anna asked me what I hoped I would get for my birthday, and I deadpanned back, “something I’ve probably already lost like ignorance.” Thankfully, though, she had the sense to get me something I like. She got me an IU sweatshirt so come November I can efficiently eliminate the hospitality and care this community has shown me. I’ve danced delicately around a few inquiries about my basketball partisanship, but I think it will be too difficult to hide when the associate pastor is seen wearing Cream and Crimson come hardwood time.

Anna also got me the latest cd in Paul Simon’s varied and rich music career. Over time, I’ve all but accumulated his life’s work. I like him because he’s a storyteller, not just a musician, but whereas he use to do works representing whole lands or cultures (like Rhythm of the Saints or Graceland) he now seems to be focusing on domestic affairs and personal/existential struggles. His last cd was something of a mid-life, over-the-hill-and-looking-back compilation. Consequently, his lyrics have lost some of their beauty or luster – being replaced by frankness. He seems to me a poet trying to hit the mark of life’s beauty even in the mundane and ordinary, but he’s also started to embrace the absurd as part of his art – like Marlon Brando walking around in The Godfather with an orange in his mouth just before he dies as if to say sometimes life is silly or unexplainable …

Or maybe Brando and Simon tried to show that sometimes the most complicated of things exists in unison with the most simple. If that’s the case, then that makes me feel better about my birthday because it seems that isn’t so much about big days and little days anymore, nor about good days and bad days. When life gathers enough history, days are days – not much worse than others and not much better either. That’s something Paul Simon has likely sung about, and, in fact, I can hear in my mind one of his recent ballads …

“Man, you’re old … getting old … getting old.” So it goes. Well, happy birthday to me.

Wes