A Meditation on Birthdays

                          Seventy-five.
It sucks you into the magic of
              “three-quarters of a century”.
This is “wise-man-on-mountain” territory.
But no...
it is just me,
being me daily
to the exclusion of all else.

I like birthdays.
They are ours: individually and collectively
developed to include
us all.
They celebrate!
(not a god, not a prophet, not a sage,
not a sports icon, not a vapid celebrity)
They celebrate each of us,
with our warts and our weird;
our strengths and our deficits;
our loves, and our losses;
who we are,
and who we would 
like to be.

I am happy that,
somewhere along time’s arrow,
I have become a repository of history.
I remember WWII blackouts;
a home without electricity;
outdoor toilets;
seeing Princess Elizabeth
before she was a queen;
living in Mao’s Beijing,
with Lin Piao dead on the border;
Georgetown, with the memory of
James Jones,
and his call to madness;
the election of Junius Jayawardena
as President of Sri Lanka;
and the Killing Fields 
as they were happening;
and Santiago
weeks before the murder of 
Salvadore Allende;
just some of the highlights,
with much more forgotten
than most experience.

So yeah.  Seventy-five, eh?

Seems to be working for me...
                                            so far.