My Soon Birthday

The person I once was is still me

                               Helen Bevington

In a few days I will be ninety; a ridiculous number that doesn’t compute in my head. I suppose my life is more than half over and that reminds me of……the thought just escaped me. For all the millions of cells which have sloughed off millions more have replenished my central headquarters. My secret for longevity is to ignore all secrets for longevity. I used to say my gevity was long enough but alas.

If I may be permitted to indulge my curmudgeon side…save your money on vitamins, minerals, herbal teas etc… I regard them as a hoax industry. The body is remarkably self-healing. Unless you are trapped in an abattoir you will get enough fruits and veggies to sustain your bodily needs without any nutritional supplements. I know of no one who has died of scurvy, beriberi or pellagra.

Growing old is a great adventure. It is a time of becoming. My clay is still soft. The juices flow even as we become the irrelevant other. Otherness is a noble state. It comes with eyes to see obliquely and a license for mischief or at least permission to cultivate eccentricities. Go ahead, play the age-card.  It gets you some measure of deference and thirteen bagels as a dozen.

True, when John Keats was my age he’d been dead for sixty-five years. Some people squeeze in their genius in a few short years, others spread it out. It is a problem which has never concerned me.  It’s too late for greatness; I’ll settle for goodness as each day is fully met with reverence and wonder.

The calendar is a supreme fiction as Einstein almost said. We live in the illusion of time. The great ledger will show I was born on March 21^st, 1933. I never got around to commend my parents for their auspicious family planning. A tribute to their vision that I should arrive with the vernal equinox which is spring’s birthday, at least in the northern hemisphere. I was umbilically blessed as I swam to dry land from that embryonic sea. My entrance arrived in concert with buried bulbs emerging, coral trees hanging their red lanterns and migratory whales spouting their hallelujahs.

It was also 14 days after FDR took his oath of office. His intonations about nothing to fear were reasurring to me after that first slap. 

On the day of my birth, which is a year before my first birthday, the weather report was sunny with increasing darkness at night. To have entered this world on the equinox, with twelve hours of light and the other half in darkness has granted me an even disposition except when dealing with computers, streaming sites, smart phones and all other companies who answer the phone declaring that my call is very important to them. They test my threshold of endurance. My shadow side also includes animus towards religious orthodoxies, willful nescience, political mendacity and goat cheese. With all the rest, I’m fine.   

My nonagenarian birthday cake with its six rows of fifteen lit candles would be enough to burn down the house. I’ll pass for a symbolic pie in my face. There must be a poem in all that. It’s enough to imagine it. I don’t have to write it.  

These past eighteen months have been a time of grief and renewal.  Following Peggy’s legacy …. I am filled with love and gratitude for my family and friends, with enthusiasm and discovery of new resources within. I can still hear the music of the orchid on my window sill as well as its wagging tongue. Having seemingly died it is now in its third purple bursting resurrection. Every day is the birthday of the day before. No end in sight.