Seems a good time to do a bit of an inventory.
I am 45 years old this morning and will be for the rest of the year. A friend once said, "I don't get birthdays. Why should we celebrate the fact that we traveled once around the sun?" What better thing to celebrate? I think we ought to celebrate every turn of the Earth and every rise and set of the sun and moon. To have traveled so far through space and time is tremendous. Besides, it's good to have a day set aside for each person and since the births of each of my children were such wonderments, birthdays seem ripe for celebration. I made it around the sun again! Let's dance and be merry!
I'm 213.4 pounds this morning. We just got back from vacation in Maine. I ate half the state's supply of lobster. And since scripture demands that seafood be followed by ice cream I had that too. My exercise, aside from hiking Cadillac Mountain, was writing 750 words each morning and watching the tide. Now that I'm home, I can see what to do about the weight that I've accumulated for forty five turns round the sun.
My two daughters are awake and making a movie. They video diaries in Maine and before the day is out we will watch the finished video. They are happy and laughing as they were nearly all of our vacation. They will finish their twelfth and tenth orbits this year and are the two of the three suns around which I happily orbit. The younger wakes with a smile and many more than 750 words already on her tongue. The older arrives in a fog, hair tangled, and whimpering while waving a limp and still sleeping hand. Both greetings light me up like a birthday cake.
My wife is still asleep in our bed, savoring the last week before she returns to the job of getting our daughters to school and herself to work. She will wake soon and come to me. There is no question in her mind that a birthday is to be celebrated. Her question is how to do so lavishly enough, how to demonstrate all of her love. She will wrap her sleepy arms around me in a hug. Her eyes will close and she will hold on. There is no greater love anywhere on this spinning planet at any point in our orbit around this sun.
The cats want food, the dog is napping after eight hours asleep. The morning is grey and quiet. The computer plays Brad Mehldau's piano jazz. My fingers type these words.
I am forty five years old. A writer. In love. At peace in this moment and hoping to spend most of this orbit that way. I have ideas for writing. And I feel that this is the year in which some things that have seemed so opaque become clearer. I feel open to such a clearing and ready for it. I'm not struggling to find it so much as feeling how it is coming to be.
This is my day. Mine and sixteen million other people's. I hope we all have a great one, that we celebrate our trip through space, and that this next orbit is spectacular for us all. We deserve it.
Celebrate! And write on.
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