A Long Time Ago

I was born at a little before six in the morning on a fairly warm solstice in Philadelphia, the only thing of any real significance that I did at that hour until I was in my thirties. It was just me and my mom in the delivery room, along with an assortment of whatever medical personnel were on hand. They didn’t let dads into those rooms back then, so my dad was home waiting for the phone call. After it came he violated nearly every traffic law the city had on his way down to the hospital.

I was glad that those rules no longer applied when I had my own kids. The delivery room rules, I mean. I got to be there when Oliver and Lauren were born, and while my role was mostly ceremonial it is an experience I treasure.

Traffic laws still have their place, though they do get more generously interpreted in the area around a hospital. People are in a hurry, after all.

My dad told me that I was born on a fairly warm day and it stayed warm for a while after that, until early January when I was christened in the middle of a blizzard. “You opened the front door and the wind blew you out the back,” he said. But that was later. They kept new mothers in the hospital for a long time back then, something that annoyed my mother to no end. Eventually she decided that she felt fine and she wanted to bring her newborn home for Christmas so she checked herself out and off we went. As the first grandchild on either side, I got passed around like a prize. My uncle gave me a stuffed Huckleberry Hound as my first Christmas gift, and I kept it until it fell apart about a decade ago. They said I handled the holiday pretty well for a first-timer. I probably slept through most of it, if I know me.

That was a long time ago now.

But every year on this day I officially get another year older. I can’t say I feel all that different from one day to the next, but it all accumulates and eventually I notice.

It’s going to be a pretty quiet day. Oliver’s already home. Lauren and Shai will come down later. We’ll have a nice dinner and maybe play some cards and hang out, just the five of us. That sounds like a great birthday to me.

The older you get the more you look back, because there’s more there to see back there with each passing day. It’s been a busy year, and there hasn’t been much time or energy for reflection but it’s good to do that now and then.

I’m not sure what the future will hold but we press on regardless, shaping what comes next as best we can.

Happy birthday to me.