Special Day

It is my birthday today.

I am 67 which means I have been taking up space, using raw materials and breathing air for 2,112,912,000 seconds. When I put it that way it doesn’t seem so long a time. In some ways I feel I have just started and in others I feel like I am just DONE.

Birthdays don’t mean very much to me any longer. When I was small my birthday meant that on this one day every year I would get a present and my brother wouldn’t get one. I would get a cake made just for me. I would wear a paper hat and my family would sing HAPPY BIRTHDAY to just me. At school if the teacher was so inclined, a mention would be made of the special day before we tackled some onerous math problem or discover that Hernan Cortez was the conquistador that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire. I suppose that all of those things made me feel just a little special and what kid doesn’t need to feel special every now and then.

At this stage of my life I have come to grips with who I am and know that I do have talents that make me special. Mainly to myself, but I am the only person whose opinion matters in this instance. I guess I can say I am content being who I am and I continue to work to better myself. I am an ongoing project that probably won’t get finished before I die.

Yesterday I got a birthday card in the mail from my daughter in Ontario and the day before I was treated to a meal at my son’s house. Not a birthday dinner, but a quasi birthday dinner. The real family celebration will be when we all get together in a few weeks when Maegan and Ryan visit from Toronto.

Today I will get numerous birthday greetings from my “friends” on Facebook. Probably tomorrow there will be one or two belated greetings for the few who didn’t check the upcoming birthdays. I kind of like that Facebook reminds me when there is a birthday because in the past only a select few got cards or phone calls on their birthdays. So today I will get greetings from good friends (in real life) people I knew…ish in high school, work friends, a person that believes the government is using jets to release chemicals into the upper atmosphere. I can’t understand why either. I will get birthday greetings from people I have nothing in common with other than a Facebook identity. There will be a Happy Birthday from people that I should block but don’t really want to hurt their feelings even though I don’t actually care that much.

I won’t get Facebook greetings from a few people that added me as a friend so that they could brag they have 2,127 friends. Who has time to wish 2,127 people a Happy Birthday? You would have to wish 5.8 people happy birthday every single day of the year! It exhausts me just thinking about it.

Today I will go out to breakfast with one of the few people I know loves me. The other people that love me will call and wish me the best. I will do some work in the garage, walk the dog, do a carving, Write a blog posting, make a couple of saw horses and generally just putter around doing those things in life that make me special to me.  

It will be a special day!