Happy Birthday to Me!

“We all grieve in different ways,
Some people grieve longer than others and
Some people grieve forever.”

-Louis T. Wermann


I’m in a particularly melancholy mood this evening, listening to Celtic-flavored music, sad songs, songs of freedom and loss. My birthday’s coming up. On Saint Patrick’s Day in the year 1971 I breathed my first breath. March, wind, spring. The crocus have started blooming, appearing out of the cold ground and opening for the growing sun. The saucer magnolia in the front yard is ablaze with color and life and the peach in the back should open up completely with a couple of days worth of warm weather over this first weekend of the month of March. This winter has been strange – punctuated with loss and bitter cold. Tears.

I was adopted. It’s a beautiful thing. I was raised by a family of people who love me, but are in some ways fundamentally very different from me. It has given me a tremendous sense of freedom. I learned at a very young age, at least I was exposed to, the concept of sacrifice and loss. I don’t know who my birth parents are. I started to look several years ago but then I met a lovely woman I quickly fell in love with and married and the urgency of that search faded. Now I’m ambivalent about it – about finding people who look like me and share my genetics. I’m happy with who I am. I’m excited about who I may become. My birthdays are tinged with sadness though. There is no way not to think about the woman who decided to give me up.

My dad told me I was adopted as soon as my parents figured I was old enough to understand. I was around five at the airport when he told me that I was not his biological son. I remember a big yellow jet airliner just lifting off from the runway and pointing at it. My dad always recalls that to me as a sign I was accepting and not bothered by this strange news.

It’s weird being adopted. When I think about it – well one set of people chose me. So in that regard I feel special in that I was chosen. On the other side of the coin another set of people chose to give me up. So I was forsaken. I feel a sense of freedom – free from genetic expectations. But I also sometimes feel isolated. It can sometimes be difficult to reconcile these feelings. Ultimately I think it leaves me with a sense of chaos. Sometimes we think we are in control of our lives but at other times that sense of control proves itself to be a crumbling illusion.

So Happy Birthday Anyway!

But what the hell – we are all in this soup together. We’re all swimming upstream. Our lives are all growing shorter. Looking backwards is a fool’s plan or the luxury abided a leisure class of people. Looking back is a luxury, or the ability of a spoiled child to waste so easily and to be so careless. The fabric of order is at best a very loose knit of very questionable material. The likelihood of unraveling is always near.

Saint Patrick’s Day Game Plan

Yeah birthday’s get me to thinking – too much really. This year I’m going to embrace the Chico tradition of going out on the town, enjoying live music, and having a drink with friend’s at an establishment or three. I’ll dress myself from head to toe in green and soak in the sun or rain of an early spring day. I will post a smile upon my face and fortify it with strong medicine periodically. By nightfall I will be worse for the wear. It will be like living an entire lifetime in a single day. I will rise fresh and early at sunrise and I will collapse in a sunken heap at nightfall.

Life is such a marvel. If you can look at it just the right way it shimmers and shines and makes you laugh out loud. Not because it is good and not because it is bad but just because it is. All this, everything around us is.

So Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to you and whatever your plans for the day may be please have a good and a safe day.