My Birthday Tomorrow

Age is of no number. More and more, it means less and less. Now, the calendar says I am 92. How is this possible? I’m also 17, 29, 40, 60 and dammit, 92 (dyslexic 29). We live to defy the numbers. The imagined candles on my imagined cake could burn the house down but my feet remain on the ground, at the ready for buoyancy.

My architecture and inventory are original equipment. Given all the cells that slough off I’m lucky those marbles in my brain seemed to have repaired themselves better than my joints. So happy birthday, organs, new and old. 

Life is the great poem I could never write; but living it is better. Nothing much rhymes except with itself, and the last lines are still being lived, no end in sight.

I can't come to the phone right now. I’m communing with the barren branch of the coral tree outside the window; the two of us clinging to a memory of summer. I see no sign of chlorophyll, yet I feel certain another season is on the verge. A belief, as Cummings put it, in the leaping greenly spirit of things, illimitably Earth.

I want to say it is fun being old, this last chapter of the great adventure. In spite of the funeral of democracy, I find myself laughing a lot. Anne Lamott calls it carbonated holiness. I’m filled with gratitude and daily amaze. And I still have much to learn from my three daughters and dear friends.

Consider the furniture in this room. As if for the first time I'm gazing at the contours of the table across from me which I hadn’t really given its due. I am even enjoying the near empty shelves which, until recently, housed about two thousand books. In a sense we grow by subtraction.

I can still hear echoes of their discourse. Wendell Berry huddled with Barry Lopez.  Wallace Stevens with Helen Vendler. Wiliam Trevor telling yarns to Niall Williams and Jane Kenyon in dialogue with Eleanor Wilner as well as the ghosts of Kunitz, Roethke and Stafford. All of them exercise my imagination. I am also learning to find alignment with their absence and what is unsayable within myself.

I’m told I was born on March 21^st. I wouldn’t know. As I recall I was busy that day. Surely the date of my arrival is a tribute to family planning. I never took my mother and father to be such visionaries. The first day of spring is Nature’s birthday, at least in this hemisphere. I took my first breath as the lilies were exhaling, and hyacinth bulbs emerging. Whales and migratory birds were in transit on their appointed paths. Seasonal resurrection was in the air.

Somewhere along the way, the firmament shifted, and the vernal equinox moved from the 21st to the 20th. It must have been from Bach's organ music. He shares a birthday with me.

Not everyone can claim an equinox. Equal parts day and night make for a balanced life, granting the shadow side its due. I do have a hate-list which includes dictatorships, religious orthodoxies, willful nescience (junk science) and goat cheese.

Astrologically speaking, a language in which I have no fluency, I have lived my life on the cusp. Part ram (Aries), part fish (Pisces). I’ll settle for amphibian, half in, half out of water, and take my chances. Gurgle and Baa. The cusp has granted me a view from the bridge with an occasional glimpse into the beyond.

The secret to longevity is that there is no secret to longevity.