Birthday

Today is my birthday— 49 years old. Yes, at 4:49 AM on June 24, 1956 I was born at the old Madison General Hospital, in Madison, Wisconsin. It was back in the days of tailfins and Elvis: whoever would've guessed that 49 years later I would be sitting here in my own home at the keyboard of a computer, publishing the news into cyberspace? ("What, no flying car?")

One of the benefits of working a job like mine, where I don't have to punch any timeclock, is that I've contrived to arrange my schedule this week so that I get today off. May just sit around, may head out somewhere, we'll have to see.

A few notable birthdays from years past:

9th birthday (1965):  My cousins came to visit for a few days. I got a wooden chess set for my birthday. Then I came down with the mumps, dammit!

18th birthday (1974):  I was working on a homemade mah-jongg set. I found that being 18, and an adult, felt very different— well, for about six hours, anyway.

19th birthday (1975):  I was working on a set of tiles for the Quintuple Arcana (in my own Hermetic language, called Mna Jondir-Pantho Zinisa), a board game I was inventing which was like no game you've ever heard of before.

23rd birthday (1979):  Living in an apartment on Langdon Street in Madison, and coasting through the summer on what I'd earned the year before as a teaching assistant in the math department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Went down to the Parthenon on State Street for a gyros sandwich, then went out to the theater to see a movie.

28th birthday (1984):  Living out in Washington State, up in the Cascade Mountains. Took a few days of vacation to go up to Seattle. The Pike Place Market. Dinner in a Bolivian restaurant, good food but very slow service.

32nd birthday (1988):  Living in Durham, North Carolina, a student at Duke University. Living that summer off proceeds from the sale of my nigh-complete collection of Fantastic Four comics. I took the day off and drove up to Richmond, Virginia.

33rd birthday (1989):  Spending the summer studying for my prelims in the fall. My birthday was the only day all summer, besides the Fourth of July, that I didn't spend 12 to 14 hours a day studying: went down to Chapel Hill and wandered Franklin Street for the day.

38th birthday (1994):  Living in Mendota, Illinois. Some of my parishioners threw a birthday party for me.

40th birthday (1996):  A horrible summer. By unforeseen circumstances that would be considered too implausible if they occurred in a work of fiction, I found myself trapped, working in a warehouse, saving and scheming for my infamous midlife-crisis 2000-mile cross-continent Escape to Seattle later that summer.

41st birthday (1997):  Back in the same warehouse, and in the midst of my "latter turning." Utterly crushed down by life, I could now in a strange new way "see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower."

43rd birthday (1999):  Packing to move to Iowa. This was also the summer I finally got home Internet access.

49th birthday (2005):  And here I am, blesséd to be here. Still have a few loose ends to pull together for this Sunday, and for the upcoming Eitzen Lions Fourth of July event. But not today...