"To me - old age is always ten years older than I am."
A stressful Wednesday, this, for a lot of reasons.
I must start my workday a little earlier than usual, in about an hour, on a conference call in which opposing counsel and I will bicker over the venue of a mediation while the mediator plays the game for $600 an hour. Sometimes my vocation just splashes me with stupidity. Why not just do this mediation by Zoom? Or write the names of three equally undesirable locations on slips of paper we'll drop in a hat, draw one, and live with it? Such a waste.
It's also my birthday, Day One of my fifty-ninth trip around the sun, to use a tired phrase. Peg corrected me on the calculation of my age yesterday. "Unless my math is wrong, you're only turning 58." Well yes, but on your first birthday you've completed one year on earth and are beginning year two. And so on. Our birthday marks the beginning of the trip into our next year. So my math passes muster.
How will I celebrate this anniversary of my sainted mother squeezing me into the world, numbed by some form of anesthesia called a "saddle block" that I understand they don't give anymore, while my less-sainted father drank in a bar across the street? Hell if I know, and that's the stressor right now.
You see, birthdays are a big deal in Peg's world. She pretty much takes the entire month of May to celebrate hers, and the monthlong festival is marked by things like flights to Portugal or new roadsters. Now she wants my birthday to be special, a kindness on her part, and it's giving me heartburn trying to conjure some guidance to pass along to her. I can't even figure out a meal.
So, I guess we start with today's givens. Five-count 'em, five!--conference calls today, starting with that quibble at 8:15 and stretching through the "Scheduling Order Discussion" at 3:30 with a screenful of lawyers on Zoom wringing their hands over whether their experts can reasonably be expected to have their Rule 26 reports prepared any sooner than forty-five days after the close of fact discovery.
Is it any wonder I drink?
But not until after that call, of course. Maybe there will be time later to go hit golf balls. That's always a nice diversion, but it means no home-cooked meal because we won't be finished until well after six. We could always go to the Cellar after golf for a tapas supper, but I cringe at the $200 price tag that accompanies that option.
How about a drive up to Seneca Lake? It's a beautiful day, a little on the hot side, and the road to Watkins Glen is one of many Laughing Places for the two of us. But once we get there our culinary options are limited, and Watkins Glen in July feels a little like Gatlinburg or Panama City Beach, and not in a good way. More like tacky tourist hell.
So the pressure's on to come up with a plan to make this day special, by God, even as it's slipping away while I write this. No time to lose!
And that, my friends, is what's wrong with life these days, mine and I bet yours as well. We're so busy with this constant compulsion not to waste time, that we've forgotten the value of wasted time. What would be a luxury birthday gift? Sprawling on the grass somewhere with no phone coverage, taking in the beauty all around, not even cracking a book because the will to self-improvement would inevitably drive my choice of tome. Trying to rediscover a little of the wonder and the joy, mirth not at someone else's expense, peace but not the sort of peace they've found up on Hope Cemetery Hill, that we all possessed as our birthright when we came into this world. Just being, and feeling for once that we all are, as Kurt Vonnegut once put it, "lucky mud" to find ourselves alive and upright at this moment.
This guy could still feel all that, perhaps without being able to articulate it.
I'm pretty sure that's our house the second time we lived in Kansas City, in the fall of 1967.
Damn, I need to call my mom today. She always called me on my birthday, but these days she lies alone in an assisted living facility in the north Dallas exurbs, and I'm guessing she'll be waiting for me to call.
One more duty to add to the list--make that six calls, or seven if I extend the same kindness to my equally immobile father. That sprawl in summer grass will have to wait, but I hope not too long lest I run out of time and find myself lying under the sod instead of on it.
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