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This coming Friday is my birthday – the radio stations will be playing Elvis Presley all day long, because he too was born on January 8.
If I’m lucky, someone will have discovered that David Bowie and Shirley Bassey were also born on January 8, and they’ll play “Changes” and “Goldfinger.”
It could have been much worse — Richard Nixon was born on January 9, although now I have to share January 8 with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un of North Korea.
At least I share with Stephen Hawking, José Ferrer, Graham Chapman and author Terry Brooks as well.
My mother’s doctor thought I would be a December baby, but my mother was born on Christmas Day, so I think she willed me to wait until after the New Year.
My parents were married on January 8. When they were celebrating their 5th wedding anniversary — the traditional gift is wood — what my mom got instead was a race to the hospital in the middle of a whopper of an Arizona thunderstorm, and after long hours of labor, I finally arrived. Be careful what you wish for!
The trouble with being born so close to Christmas and New Years is that you get everything at once — presents, social engagements, aging — and everyone is partied out just when you’re having a birthday celebration.
Plus, there’s so little time to assimilate whatever insights another year of age might bring you. You’ve barely accepted that you’ll have to re-learn what year it is, and bam! you also have to re-learn what age you are.
Who has time to become any wiser?
So here are some thoughts on getting older that I’ve borrowed from others:
Dorothy Parker —
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound — if I can remember any of the damn things.
In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year
BY W.S. MERWIN
.
It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever
.
Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young
.
There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth
.
There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses
.
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
.
SHIRLEY BASSEY —
You don’t get older, you get better.
Poem For My 43rd Birthday
by Charles Bukowski
.
To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine—
just a lightbulb
and a potbelly,
grayhaired,
and glad to have
the room.
.
T.S. ELIOT —
The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
Cheerios
BY BILLY COLLINS
.
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.
.
Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.
.
Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude’s older than Cheerios
the way they used to say
.
Why that’s as old as the hills,
only the hills are much older than Cheerios
or any American breakfast cereal,
and more noble and enduring are the hills,
.
I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.
.
CHER —
Some guy said to me: “Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll?”
I said: “You'd better check with Mick Jagger.”
Counting Backwards
BY LINDA PASTAN
.
How did I get so old,
I wonder,
contemplating
my 67th birthday.
Dyslexia smiles:
I’m 76 in fact.
.
There are places
where at 60 they start
counting backwards;
in Japan
they start again
from one.
.
But the numbers
hardly matter.
It’s the physics
of acceleration I mind,
the way time speeds up
as if it hasn’t guessed
.
the destination—
where look!
I see my mother
and father bearing a cake,
waiting for me
at the starting line.
.
Satchel Paige —
Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter.
Ninon De Lenclos, On Her Last Birthday –
by dorothy parker
.
So let me have the rouge again,
And comb my hair the curly way.
The poor young men, the dear young men
They'll all be here by noon today.
.
And I shall wear the blue, I think-
They beg to touch its rippled lace;
Or do they love me best in pink,
So sweetly flattering the face?
.
And are you sure my eyes are bright,
And is it true my cheek is clear?
Young what's-his-name stayed half the night;
He vows to cut his throat, poor dear!
.
So bring my scarlet slippers, then,
And fetch the powder-puff to me.
The dear young men, the poor young men-
They think I'm only seventy!
.
Ninon de Lenclos (1620 –1705) was a French author, courtesan, freethinker, and patron of the arts. She was 84 when she died.
And a just-missed Capricorn (born January 20), who lived to be 100:
George Burns —
At my age flowers scare me.
The statistics say we are 14 per cent more likely to die on our birthday than any other day. We have no choice about going, so who wouldn’t want to eat cake surrounded by well-wishers before heading for that Undiscovered Country?
Not that I’m planning on leaving anytime soon — I still have a lot of writing to catch up on, and a husband I’ve fooled into thinking he’s better off with me around.
Rita Rudner —
On my tombstone it will say: “I tried everything — nothing was easy.”
Sources and Further Reading
- "In the Winter of my Thirty-Eighth Year" from The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carriers of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment © 1993 by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press) — www.poetryfoundation.org/...
- “Poem For My 43rd Birthday” by Charles Bukowski from All's Normal Here: A Charles Bukowski Primer, edited by Loss Pequeno Glazier (Ruddy Duck Press 1985) — www.poemhunter.com/…
- “Ninon De Lenclos, On Her Last Birthday” from Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, edited/© 1996 by Stuart Y. Silverstein (Scribner Poetry) — www.poemhunter.com/…
Birthday Photos
- Elvis Presley
- David Bowie
- Dame Shirley Bassey
- Stephen Hawking
Photo
- detail of stars above volcano, from a larger photo by Colin Legg*
Print
*check out Legg’s FB page — fantastic photos! www.facebook.com/...