Birthdays, Birthdays, always another Birthday........

Eighteen took an eternity. Twenty one, well, it was about friggin time. Twenty-five, it was nice. Thirty, well, it snuck up on me. I never saw it coming. I looked back and couldn't for the life of me remember having been around that long. I was fully prepared for forty. Forty was good. And I still looked maybe twenty six at the most, although a few years earlier they had stopped carding me.

By the time forty-five ambled along, I'd had enough. No more birthdays for me, nosiree! The larger numbers were having some wicked psychological effect on my body. It was slowing down, and pains that used to go away weren't doing that any more. Strange hairs started growing in weird places. I started having this idea I was getting wise in some ways. Instead of knowing everything like I had back at eighteen, I was starting to realize there was a hell of alot I DIDN'T know about shit. So, forty five was about as old as I was willing to get.

That's when I decided to ditch the old tradition of adding another candle to the cake (which I hate, by the way; I prefer ice cream) and simply celebrate my annual forty-fifth birthday every year, much in the same vein as Jerry Lewis' Labor Day Telethon, the annual Thanksgiving day parades, etc, you get my drift. Since I don't appear to be aging, I can get away with it. If I shaved my beard, with it's sneaky streaks of gray in it, I could easily pass as 36 anyway. Sure, there's gray in my hair, which I have been blessed by these great genes to still have plenty of, but nobody notices it unless I point it out to them. When you tell someone how old you are and you have to resort to pointing out stealth signs of age to back it up, then you know you have it sussed. Still, coming home from work feeling like my legs have been beat with iron bars, and waking in the morning with my back on fire keeps me honest, at least to myself.

I always felt that I was meant to be delivered on the 4th of July to celebrate our nation's independence, but the stork got held up in a holding pattern for two days and thus I was late getting here. So, on this 6th of July, after all the smoke has cleared and the four day holidays are over, I get to celebrate my Sixth Annual Forty-Fifth birthday. Anyone who suggests I'm really 51 is a liar! We here at Pendragon Hold will enjoy the day as usual......which these days is nothing special. I don't do cakes, 45 candles are a fire hazard, and we can't afford anything I really, really want, so I will enjoy this day the way any sane man should; being glad I'm still alive, not homeless, and in relative good health, married to a woman who adores me in her own irreverent fashion. The state of Florida will give me the gift that keeps on giving, that being the requirement that I get my tags renewed, and AARP will make another attempt at convincing me that I'm a senior citizen in dire need of protection from those young whipper-snappers in Washington.

If there truly was a deity that answered prayers, it would be for this one gift; to want those things worth wanting, to be blessed to have what I do, and the smarts to understand the difference between that and that 56 inch plasma HDTV I feel so guilty at lusting after. But honestly, the special request I'd put in if He/She/It were accepting them would be that my wife would be cured of all those pains that have haunted her in most of these years I have known her. I've given her precious little more than my love, and that's all she's asked of me. That's what makes every birthday I've had these past 13 or so years so special, no matter how I calculate them.