Happy Birthday #25
Quarter Century
What’s up, my happy people?
Once again, we find ourselves straddling the apple-horn of autumn… once again it is October, that month of slanted sunshine and bitter winds, romance crunchy leaves and the promise of frost.
It’s my birthday next week.
But what is a birthday to a man in his mid-twenties living abroad far from home? Gone are the pointy birthday hats and balloons of childhood celebrations; they have been banished to a place far in the future, awaiting my big 9–0 in the ‘tirement home, surrounded by cackling cat ladies and the horny old man with Alzheimers. Gone too are the intimate get-togethers with old friends, the close-knit birthday dinners of high school and college; my closest and most intimate friends are scattered now across the globe, dispersed like beaming white seashells in the sand. Le’ sigh, as the French would say, le’ sigh.
On Saturday I will be 25 years old, and I am not looking for a celebration. This birthday is a marker of sorts, a quarter-century milestone of free-wheeling glee behind me and a growing sense of maturity and adulthood that stalks me now like the most suave and assured of hunters: my future gets off on watching me squirm. It’s all good, no doubt… it’s natural, and as far as I’ve been told, anything and everything that is natural is good.
But just because I’m not celebrating doesn’t mean you don’t have to give me a present! :-)
You know the drill: I want a nice, long, personal letter from each and every one of you. Tell me what you’ve been up to, sure, but more importantly tell me how you’re feeling, how YOU are dealing with the creep out of adolensence and into adultood, tell me about the passions you have now that you never imagined in your teens, or about the compromises you’ve made along the way. Tell me whatever you want. Tell me nothing at all. Write a limmerick. Share a song. Send a photograph. Hum me a tune as you walk to work, think me a thought and stretch your arms up against the wind, face to the sun, and I’ll be the happiest birthday boy there ever was.
I love and miss you all, and keep you in my head often and heart always.
Yours, truly,
Jonathan
