Photo by Katie Rosario on Unsplash
Some birthdays are cause for celebration. I didn’t consider my 75th birthday to be one of them. Aside from my radical amazement that I’m still walking the planet after three-quarters of a century, it didn’t strike me as an occasion worthy of summoning friends and Family to offer toasts, present gag gifts, and deliver snarky birthday cards poking fun at my whitening brow and steadily crumbling infrastructure.
Consequently, there was no party, and I observed an untraditional birthday signing copies of The AfterWork: Finding Fulfilling Alternatives to Retirement in a delightful Rehoboth Beach, Delaware bookstore. The bookstore was jammed with customers (drawn not by me but by a torrential downpour), and I sold a few books. So happy birthday to me.
But while my 75th was not a worthy occasion for celebration, I do think other significant milestone birthdays are. For example:
1st – I don’t remember my own, but as a parent I adopted the widely observed ritual: Sit the birthday baby in their high chair, place a chocolate cupcake or a slice of chocolate cake on their tray, and laugh raucously as the baby slams their tiny fist into the cake and smears chocolate all over face, hands, hair, and floor.
13th – in Jewish tradition, the child celebrates a Bar or Bat Mitzvah and is treated like royalty for a day, followed immediately by a torturous six-year journey through darkest Adolescence.
21st – This is the date on which you are legally permitted to do what you’ve been doing illegally for years.
30th – This marks the moment you realize you are no longer just pretending to be an adult. A 4-day-old baby in my arms brought that reality home.
39th – On this day, I called my father and said, “I’m not sure how it happened, but now you and I are same age.”
52nd – Not normally a landmark, but it was on this birthday that I received a note from my son that read: “Congratulations! If you had received a card for every year you’ve lived, you would finally be playing with a full deck.”
60th – A small celebration marked the day I became a sexagenarian. It sounded a lot more exciting than it turned out to be.
65th – Until recently, this milestone represented the advent of Retirement. Now it only means you can enroll in Medicare.
There is a clear pattern here: The older I get, the less thrilled I am by the prospect of cake and candles. As another writer puts it, birthdays become less like milestones and more like millstones.
But what a milestone birthday is good for, if not embarrassment among friends, is for taking a step back, breathing deeply, and putting some perspective on life to date.
The ambitions of my youth were grand. Like Clark Kent, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter fighting for truth, justice, and the American way (or was that Superman?). I wanted to be an acclaimed figure in the world of books. I pictured myself writing in an upstairs garret of a townhouse overlooking a beautiful park.
I didn’t achieve those ambitions, but it doesn’t matter. Life took me in other directions I had not even dreamed of. In my first 75 years I managed to get an Education, support myself, enjoy a 50-year partnership with the Love of my life, raise two well launched and reasonably well adjusted children, make good friends, make stupid mistakes, and come out smiling. I have enough to eat and a roof over my head. My bottom line is that I feel satisfied and content. I have no regrets.
I have no clue what awaits me on the downhill side of 75, but I look forward to being surprised. I plan to stay curious, keep writing, nurture loving Relationships, and encourage laughter. Especially laughter. We all need more laughter. If I can go out smiling, that will be something worth celebrating.
