Of Birthdays

Well it is almost here, another birthday to celebrate. At 63 I am still considered a young man by some readers and approaching geezer status by others. I miss not being able to call my mother on my birthday to say thank you. She gave me life and instruction and meaning for living. Her memory is my birthday gift, as are other fond memories that come – oddly triggered by a smell. Just this weekend I was kayaking the Concord River and that smell, that damp musty wood smell, reminded me so well of fishing the Mill Pond so long ago.

This experience reminded me of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Imitations of Immortality.” Of birthdays that seem so long ago that the smoke and smell of time bring both the fondness and an uneasy mourning of things that cannot be relived, revisited or re-loved. The gift of this birthday is like the poem Wordsworth penned. I can envy that young boy digging worms and eating green apples while being thankful for the gift of perspective that calms the urge to reach back in time, to see only as I could then, without the dampening faded color of time. 

William Wordsworth closes his poem with these words:

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

I am grateful to have a grandson whose unfiltered experience of the world can ground me in my mortality and allow me a glimpse of immortality through a life in Christ. For my baptism was my eternal birthday. Now, how will I celebrate my birthdays? With cake and Communion, with mortal frosting, and eternal Bread.