Saturday, October 27, 2012

My square peg in a round month

As a major shareholder in the Sons and Daughters of October 27, I would like to say hello to all my homies, known and unknown, including the guy I met in Ensenada, Mexico some time way back in the seventies or eighties who gave me a drunken abrazo when we discovered we both celebrated our cumpleaño on octubre vento-siete.

I have thanked about half of the better-than-I-am friends who acted on Facebook's nudge that today is my birthday. There is probably a category for the likes of me—a dormant Facebook space-filler who keeps getting messages about other friends' birthdays but does nothing to join that welcoming chorus that has serenaded me today, a ladder of 21 wishes (so far) with affectionate multiple exclamation marks. A birthday sponge am I.

I thought I would be playing "When I'm Sixty-Four" at least once today, but not yet. That number once seemed as old to me as it must have to Paul McCartney when he began writing the song as a teenager. But I've closed the distance in a remarkably short time since back in the sixties when it was a whimsical, wistful lament of sorts of someone looking ahead to when he'll be sixty-four, losing his hair, grandchildren on his knee (Vera, Chuck, and Dave—the perfect names), good for maybe mending a fuse and maybe renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear, and wondering if he'll still be needed and fed. And now I'm him, as are all the guys I went to school with, the famous, the infamous, and the vast in-between. 

And, yeah, there's some truth to the "Yours sincerely, wasting away" line, but not enough to make it un-ironic. It has more in common with every other number, in that it's a tree ring, basically, a marker; and you look around and say, okay, and oy, and look at the leaves coming down but ain't it bootiful; and while I'm at it, hey there October, you old round pumpkin and apple month, sorry I haven't been writing about you, but I have noticed you're looking especially bon vivant this year, nice colors, good oaks, sorry about the hurricane you're ending with, but I know you're one for drama, and I kind of want the Tigers to win two so it goes back to San Francisco, and, oops, gotta go.