By the time you read this, I’ll be another year older. Actually, of course, I’ll only be two weeks older than I was the last time you read this column. But you know what I mean.
For as long as I can remember, September has been my favorite month:
• It’s my birthday month. This was a really big deal when I was a kid. It’s not so big of a deal now, but we’ll talk about that later.
• When I was a kid, September signalled the start of school. Some kids lived for summer, and I liked summer OK. Summer was great, especially when I got to spend weeks with Grammar and Popo, my grandparents, up in Oklahoma. Vacation was fun, too. We always went to the mountains to escape the heat. I adore the mountains. But to tell you the truth, I lived for school, which started in September. School was way less boring than summer and way more fun than trying to think up things to do on a July afternoon.
• High school football season started in September. High school football is a divine sign that God loves us and takes pleasure when we scream like banshees at a game that, for all its fun and excitement, really doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
• Now, an increasing number of Mexican food restaurants have declared most of September “Hatch Chili Month” in celebration of the green chili peppers that grow near Hatch, N.M. When we all get to heaven, we all will eat Hatch chili rellenos for dinner every day.
As you might expect, I don’t see my birthday in the same light as I did when I was a child.
When you’re a child, a birthday is confirmation that you are gravity—the center of the universe. For one day, at least, the sun and the moon, as well as your parents and your siblings, orbit around you. And after you eat your fill of birthday cake and ice cream, you orbit around them for a few hours.
Now? Not so much.
Joanna promised to take me out to dinner on my birthday and let me pick where. (Ironically, when it’s your birthday, choosing where to eat is a special treat. But the rest of the year, we argue over who has to choose where we go out to eat.)
Molly, our youngest daughter, bought and gave me my present six weeks early, while we were in Michigan for a wedding. When I bought a couple pair of slacks on sale at my favorite men’s store two weeks before my birthday, Joanna expressed delight that she had finished “shopping” for my birthday. And Lindsay, our oldest daughter, gave me a birthday hug and kiss when she and her husband, Aaron, visited us for Labor Day. She said she’d send me a birthday present whenever she decides what it is she wants to give me for that birthday.
Still, a birthday at 53 is sweeter than it was at either 5 or 3, because now I know what a blessing it is just to thank God for another year of life.
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