Tag: birthdays

Another day older

Wild geranium. June 2025.

Every minute and every day you’re older. Any time you wish to, shout accurately, “Hey! I’m another year older!” to passersby. Their strange looks betray their misunderstanding: you are another year older from this same time one year ago.

Even so, humans seek meaning like water seeks its level. Today as I write this marks the time 71 years ago my mother labored to get me out into the world. It’s about an hour and a handful of minutes until that moment in the Pacific time zone where I was born. I’ve been pleased she did so about 99% of the time, which given its +/- 1% accuracy should be good enough for anyone. You can search this blog for the tag “aging” to see how I feel about these so-called twilight years. If death is sundown, then I don’t think I’m actually in twilight yet, but the sun has lowered itself toward my horizon of being. Despite attempting to live in the moment, I’m aware each day of the end of my life nearing, something which seemed nebulous just ten years ago. Perhaps I’m just seeking my level also.

Like the wild geranium which promises big things with those hand-sized leaves, then proffers flowers barely bigger than a 25-cent piece, we burst onto the scene, become self-aware, and agitate to “get out there” in our late teens, to make our marks on the world. What things we’ll accomplish! We flower, most of us, with little blossoms of achievement then spend the time between fruitfulness and the killing frost just…being big, green, and leafy, secure in our memories of having flowered at all.

On the Third Day of Christmas—

—no, wait! I’m not Eastern rite. I can’t just reorient the Twelve Days to suit my fancy, even if it does seem a bit ambiguous who really counts Christmas as Day One and who doesn’t. We’re going to have to acknowledge the Fourth Day of Christmas too. Hmmmmm…..

On the Third Day of Christmas someone brought to me:

Commemorative T-shirt design for my wife’s birthday. August 2018.

When I met the woman who became my wife, I knew (vaguely) that she possessed triplet sisters. One of them sang in the choir with us, after all, and the day I got to know my wife for the first time, I also spent time with that sister and her fiancée. My new-found love interest wouldn’t let me meet her family for weeks because it’s large: one of eight children who by that point were all having children too. We’re nearing the 30th anniversary of that meeting. I’m used to the triplets now, and I like everything about them (almost–their ability to slip into a ‘triplet-speak’ that’s difficult to understand remains a bit off-putting). All three gathered on our back deck in 2018 with tiaras and T’s, firmly convinced the slogan on the front told the truth. At least it’s better than their 50th birthday slogan: “150 Years of Perfection”!

For “four” I’m going with “Four Day Creep” performed by Humble Pie on their album Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore: The Complete Recordings. I discovered this complete version this year to my delight. The original took performances from four distinct shows over two days and ‘smooshed’ them onto one album. “Four Day Creep” gets the billing here because it’s the first song of each set, there are four sets, and the song has a decidedly different treatment in each performance. Here’s one of the three other performances I experienced. Turn it up. No, really up. “upper” than that. There ya go. (you’re going to need a tissue–your ears are bleeding.)

Anecdotal backstory: my first real roommate at college–I ditched the first one–name of Motorhead, introduced me to the Humble Pie Performance album. Being from New Jersey, he had attended a Humble Pie concert. “They had these big Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre speakers,” he said. “You know those? Just like the little ones with the two curved cuts to the front plates? These suckers were so big you could crawl inside of them…which the junkies did. The sheer volume of the bass would vibrate them out and they’d crawl back in!” Yeah. I remember stuff like that. As you listen to the song above, hopefully at a loud volume on a sound system with large speakers, imagine being inside a speaker while the songs were played.