I Have Lost Count

 

OH, GOOD LORD. TOMORROW IS MY BIRTHDAY. I will officially be older than dirt. I remember when Noah was in short pants and Methuselah was a teenager pestering his old man for the keys to the camel.

I have one of these birthday things every year or so it seems. As far back as I can remember I’ve been having them. When I was a kid it was kind of a big deal. I think that 16 and 21 were the biggies. I wasn’t too keen about 40 and after 50 I just stopped counting. The certifiable number for this year is both a mystery and a secret. Even I don’t know for sure. It is somewhere between 51 and 212. No…212? That can’t be right. That’s the boiling point of water and my boiling point is much lower. Let’s revise that and go with “Between 50 and Dead.” Of that much I can be sure.

As of this writing I am reasonably sure that I am not dead. I can’t make any promises about tomorrow. Check back with me then. If I respond to your query then the odds are that I am still around.

My wife, the lovely and perpetually youthful, Dawn, asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told her that she didn’t have to buy me anything. She said that she wasn’t going to, but that she was just curious about what I wanted. Subtle, isn’t it? That is yet another reason I love that woman. She has a wicked sense of humor. We should hire someone to just follow her around to do Rimshots when she launches a good one-liner like that.

Because tomorrow is my birthday I am planning a special event. I am going to sleep in until – whenever. If events go anything like they have in the past I may stay under the covers until Bedtime. That is as far as I go in planning a special event for myself.

I saw an advertising flyer this morning touting a 3^rd of July event. A local exercise and workout place (I’m not sure exactly what I should call them.) is going to have a “Free Workout” for anybody who wants it. I’m not going. Why should I get up on my birthday and go to a place that I try to avoid for the rest of the year and spend an hour sweating with strangers? I have friends and I don’t sweat with them. So the odds of me going out so I can sweat with people I don’t know are not high.

I look upon my accumulation of years with a sense of amazement. Most of the people in my family don’t make it this far various reasons. When it comes to my gene pool dying from bad bathtub gin comes under the heading of “Natural Causes.”

I have outlived, in objective terms, that 98% of my relatives who ever took a breath I’ve out lived 100% of the dead ones. It’s been mainly the little old lady Aunts who have piled up the years. The Uncles have not done so well. Most of my male relatives and ancestors have had an affinity for dangerous substances and activities.

A number of years ago I uncovered a professionally done genealogy of my family. It covered my father’s side of the family going back as far back to when they lived in caves and grunted – not too long ago I’m sad to say.

The document had a lot of details mainly because court proceedings are like that. My ancestors managed to P.O. the rich and powerful enough to actually get banished from two different countries. That’s not easy to do, but Nine-times Great Uncle “Theobald the Annoying“pulled it off. So did “Pierre the Crooked As A Dog’s Hind Leg” in France back in the 1700s.

So, I think that to honor my dishonorable ancestors tomorrow on my birthday I will play a game of Solitaire and I will cheat.

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