Celebrating Two-Thirds
It was three days before Christmas, 1953. In an era when women often spent many days in the hospital after childbirth, the doctors told my mother to go home, to be with her family for the holidays. Her new baby was going to die anyway.
The problem was that I was the second child of an rH-negative mother. In those days, infants like me usually died. But there was a new procedure available. As family lore goes, I was bundled up so my father could drive me through a Denver blizzard from St. Joseph Hospital over to Children’s Hospital.
The procedure worked. And as of August 22, 2020, it is 66 years and eight months later. That is, I have attained the honorable age of Two-Thirds of a Century! In a life that has always consisted of borrowed time, this feat is quite astonishing, in an offbeat, fun kind of way.
Maybe it’s because I wasn’t likely to have any that I tend to make a big deal out of birthdays—not just my own, but for everyone else, too. Many people shrug off their birthdays, or worse, really hate them. Phooey on that. Marking our passage through time has merit. After all, time is one of the most universal things every human shares. No one can buy, beg, or steal access to more than 24 hours in a day, and it is upon each day that lives are built. So why not celebrate two-thirds of a century?
The duration of a lifetime is a blink, even for those whose lives last a very long time. A hundred years is hardly anything in the context of the billions of years this planet has been spinning. Yet I celebrate each time it circles the sun yet again. The days of a year are when we can find places and people and memories and events and aspirations and accomplishments that add up to something: life, mine and yours. This dynamic continuum can be interesting and fun and challenging. It also inevitably leaves marks, bruises, scars. I have my fair share, both in my body and on my heart. The harsh and difficult things are part of life, too.
True, all but the most famous people are only vaguely remembered just two generations after we pass away. Yet while we’re in this game, those we come to know and love become our people, the ones who know us and care. We know and care for them in return. The point is, no one traverses the years alone. There are always people bracketing us. Some are older, and serve as our guides; some are younger, and offer help and hope for a better future.
In league with this current celebration, there’s another recent notable date: as of July 23, 2020, I also outlived both my parents, who died in their sixties. This is a bittersweet realization, certainly, and also impressive to realize. And now this. From the viewpoint of Two-Thirds of a Century, I’m not yet in the ranks of the oldest-old, but I’m no longer in the hot blue center of the flame of building a life or career, either. It’s a great place to stop for a minute and rest, take stock, look around, see what there is to see.
What I see is time speeding up. Less of a percentage of my life nowadays is spent getting from birthday to birthday, and so it seems like a whirling vortex, a tornado of time. On a very practical level, it is astonishing how quickly my dog’s 10-day blister packs of medication disappear. It seems I’m always pulling a new one out of the box. Similarly, another way I measure time is in three-day segments when it comes to winding the 250-yr-old grandfather clock that has come through the generations to my care. Each time my calendar prompts me to do that task, I shake my head. Where did those three days go? Even the decades seem to be slipping away at light-speed. How can it already be ten years since finishing my master’s degree? Noting the speed of passing time informs me how swiftly whatever I have left will also go, even if I reach the venerable ages of my godmother, Sylvia (91) and my much-loved step-father, Tim (97).
I believe I’ve lived up honorably to my motto to “live large.” And yet, I have squandered more time than I care to admit. Then again, is it really squandered if it was spent in pursuit of a decent, well-intended life? As personal histories go, mine has been met so far with considerable good fortune, for which I am humbly grateful. After all, none of it was imagined on that December day when I was born.
