Happy Birthday to Me
Portrait of the artist as a Labrador retriever.
How did this get to be sixty? I actually have fewer double chins.
It’s not my favorite picture of me in the Garden of Eden, but I ran mine a few years ago on the old blog (you can see it here)*, and this is Kathleen’s. For some totally crazy reason, the photograph was printed on frosted glass, and I was about to throw the thing out when Kathleen cried NO! In my favorite picture, you see, I’m in bed, so it’s okay that I’m smiling, but in this head shot — oh, it’s so hopelessly… hopelessly quelque chose.
Well, anyway, happy birthday to me. Sixty! It’s not possible. I accept the fact that I’m older than God &c. But sixty? What I mean to say is, I haven’t completed my merit badges! I didn’t pass the test yet! To be sixty, you have to be Really Grown Up, and I, alas — well, Kathleen said that fifty would have sounded more believable. She is not trying to compliment me, I assure you. This is not about my youthful skin! It’s about how totally inadequate I feel now that I have been called upon by Father Time to sit on the Board of Graybeards. My beard has been grey – white! – for years, but I’m still not up to the task. Doesn’t anybody remember being eight years old and wishing to be ten? Imagine being ten and finding out that it was all a fraud — that you were really eight! “Oh, the horror!”
The worst thing about my being sixty is the implications for the near and dear. They’re not happy about it at all. Neither the elder nor the younger. Especially the younger — who are suddenly not so “younger.” They’d all much rather have seen me dead before this embarrassment.
Which is what makes Fossil Darling such a dear old friend. He’s the only one who’ll admit it.
Update: I got some very nice presents, including a knockout: the English edition of the Mitford sisters’ leters, autobiographed by herself, the D of D. That was pretty terrific, and all by itself it would have made this a red letter birthday, a standout among, er, many. But then something happened after the birthday dinner that put the day in class by itself. Correction: there is one other day in my life to which tonight may be compared. It was the day that I learned that I’d be able to marry Kathleen in a Catholic Church, something that was very important to the two of us. It wasn’t until I had the news that I actually bended my knee and proposed marriage. I was accepted.
Tonight, it was my turn to say “yes,” and a happier man has never breathed.
* Goodness! I just read the entry that goes with the snapshot of me in bed. I’d forgot! It’s my coming out story., And, that being the case, I have to tell you that the value of N is “2.” As in “second-rate.”.