Letters to Marge & Maddie: Chapter 47 (Happy Birthday to me... again)

Dear Marge and Maddie,

Hi, guys. By tomorrow (or today, or a few days ago, depending on when i get to finish this post since I've been writing less and much more slowly lately), I will be forty two years old. Yeah, happy birthday to me. Again.

And yes, thankfully, it has been quite happy by most standards.

But there's always something about birthdays in one's forties that makes one dwell a little more on one's mortality than usual. It's in these years when one keeps bravely planning ahead while secretly continuing to kindle the fires of old undying dreams, while also quietly stopping to catch one's self in the mirror more and more often. Counting the lines that run deeper and deeper every summer with a mixture of tired resignation and more than a speck of mortal dread.

Or sometimes, one looks at one's own lines and sees traces of a life so beautifully imperfect, yet glisteningly colorful and less bitter than sweet.

That stuff they say about appreciating warmth after the cold, and vice versa? No light without darkness, and other similar wisey stuff? They're right. And that's what has helped make my life so wonderful. The ups and downs, the moments of having and not, the periods of crazy compressed activity that have made me more appreciative of the quiet moments of life. The fear of loss, which made me hold on like my life depended on it. And depend on it it did.

Can i ask the universe for more? Of course. That's part of what life is about. The continuance of dreaming. One asks and works for what one asks for, while never forgetting to nurse quiet contentment all throughout. And here I ask for a long and healthy life for you both, and your mother. I ask that we will continue to be surrounded by more people who wish us well than ill. I ask that we continue to be put at the right place and right time to be right there when people need us. I ask for so much more. But most of all, i ask that we never lose the state of gratefulness for everything that fills the halls of our home.

And grateful i am right now as i write this. And so as last year, happy birthday to me indeed.

'Catch you later.

Love,

Dad