On mortality.....

Yesterday was my birthday. I don’t much like birthdays. I don’t want any fuss. I don’t want any cake. I don’t want any presents. I kinda get embarrassed by it all. I’m 58 years old. I’m perfectly content with a a cold drink and a ballgame on TV.

Even typing that number staggers me. In 1985 my parents were my age. They were “old”. I was a freshman in college. I had more time ahead of me than what was past. Now it’s the other way around. Statistically, if I’m fortunate, I’ll have another 20 years. And then I’ll be gone. Stuck in the ground or placed on a mantle somewhere. There’s a cemetery near our house that contains old gravestones…..the kind that are weather beaten and mossy, most of them leaning one way or the other, with the names and years often unreadable, as if they’ve been sand-blasted away. Who were these people? Are they remembered in scrap-books somewhere? Were they heroes? Rogues? Does anybody still raise a glass to any of them?

Doubtful.

After a while, like them, it will be like I was never here at all. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Only a select few get to be remembered forever. Kings and Presidents and Gandhi and Muhammad Ali. That sort of crowd. You can’t carve everyone’s name into marble. You’d run out of room. So the rest of us do the best we can, and then we die and somebody else moves into our house. The circle of life.