A Commentary on Birthdays

Today is my birthday. 43 years ago, shortly after Thanksgiving dinner, instead of getting up to wash the dishes after the meal as was common for women to do at the time, my mother took the "easy way out": she went to the hospital and a few hours later, at 9:32 PM, gave birth to me.

It seems her avoidance to washing dishes that day, and perhaps her "guilt" at having left the other women with the task (grandmother and 2 aunts), instilled in me a passion for washing dishes. I love washing them and I feel so good, complete after I have knocked off a pile of dishes; day over, dishes done, now I can put the feet up and watch 60 Minutes or the Waltons (shows which have created a "lifereel" of sorts for my life).

"The Sound of Music" has also shaped my life and honestly, I never feel better as when I am near the Alps--except when I am sitting at Sweet Lew's in Freehold enjoying a breakfast with family, friends will be at a table nearby or just alone with a newspaper and hopefully another Yankee's victory or another Rutger's loss!

Lessons Incomplete

Amazingly, everything I was so sure of when I was 20 has now been disproven by me, my studies and time. Even some of my beliefs have embarassed me in their naivety. I remember sitting with friends on a porch on Main Street in Freehold arguing how it would be best to not have sex until you are married. We all agreed. A year or two later, we all forget about that agreement.

I couldn't cook anything when I was 27 and now I can cook or bake anything I see, taste or like. I have come to really not like eating in restuarants and have learned that any fanatical obsession with eating, exercise, not drinking, smoking or just any attempt to believe that I am better than then others always results in a "smack down" by life. So, although I don't eat sweets, today I will bake a pumpkin cheesecake pie and eat a piece! (Only one though.)

I am flawed and screw up everyday and every year and many a time during a day or a week or a month, I will ask myself, "idiot, why did you do that?" The idiot never knows but somewhere inside me the answer echoes: because you are the same, troubled, stumbling, ready-to-fight, bad tempered kid, one of 5, who was born 43 years ago, and you feel you must prove to somone something. What that "something" is and to which "someone"? Don't know. Just don't know (Sadly, most of those I should've proved something to are now gone. Yet, I know one thing, they were all happy with me when alive.)

Despite those years and a lot of knowledge I have gained, book and practical, I am still the same person in almost all respects. I still hear echoes of my thoughts, whether it be playing war with my friends in the cemetary on snow days when I imagined I was on some front in Belgium during The Battle of the Bulge; or, be it my excessive "homerun hitting" in the backyard against my brother who really hated baseball, I am still striving toward that great moment when I too will be able to extract minutes and hours of greatness from time's ordinary passage.

Fortunately, what I just realized last week was that there isn't one day, one moment, one place to which we should strive. So many times, I have left the gym after a good workout, gone to another country or spent some amazing moment at some party meeting famous people, and thought, "one day, when I am older, I will be sitting around on a porch with my guitar in my hands telling all of these tales to my kids, grand-kids and whomever else will listen."

It then dawned on me. Those people too will be living their lives and thinking the same things that I think. I suddenly realized that the life I am building is not so I can tell about it but so that I can be ready should someone ask. And, should someone somewhere need a bit of guidance as they are struggling to figure out this short stop on earth, in ways that I have been guided, I too must might find the right resources, words, examples to assist them as they go forward.

It took 43 years, but, after a nice weekend in my third hometown of Munich, sitting around drinking beers with the locals and talking for hours on end about everything--in the beer halls you can sit where there are free seats so often you sit with strangers--I came to the conclusion that I no longer need to strive for that one moment of greatness--that Reggie Jackson moment in the '77 World Series.

After 43 years of life, believe it or not, I have calmed considerably. I am ready for the next 63 years and I feel that my approach to this part of life is sounder. But, then again, in 20 years from now, these words too will seem naive and probably embarass me a bit.

And despite having so many times over the last 43 years felt like I was lost for good and would never find my beloved "Bedford Falls", someone, something, some song or some sky would snap me back on course and the snow would start falling again, some random "Bert" would recognize me and Zuzu's petals would be right where I left them.

I have no complaints, just make sure my beer is cold and that it has a nice, frothy head.

Happy Birthday to everyone on this day and the other 364.