Well. Imagine that. 55. I'm not sure how that happened so fast. It seems like just the other day Jim Gips and I were at Wuest's Grocery in San Marcos to buy wine. He had to pay for it, because it wasn't my birthday until the next day, and I was still only 17. Back then, you had to be 18 to drink legally in Texas. I can see that day clearly in my mind, as if it were happening all over again right there in front of me. How that could be thirty-seven years ago is way beyond me.

I've reached an old age at which birthdays are not so special anymore. Sure, I still like them. I like being greeted with a cheerful, "Happy birthday!" I also like to get a gift or two. But I don't exactly spend a lot of time anticipating the arrival of November 11th anymore. It just seems to sneak up on me nowadays at an increasingly faster pace. Someone once said that fifty was the new thirty. I don't know about that. I do think that, in your fifties, all the time increments are changed. A year, which seemed like forever as a child, now seems to last about the same as a month did back then. Some times I honestly feel like we take the Christmas tree down one day, only to put it back up the next.

I guess another reason that birthdays aren't so terrific is not having my parents around. My mother always did something to make it seem like an important day. For example, in 1998, when I turned 40, she contacted the Bisquick company to find the recipe for sheet cakes which she had always used when I was a kid to bake my birthday cake. She used it to bake a cake which she covered in white frosting, and then decorated as a flag with red and blue frosting. She and her friend, Marion Hill, brought it up to the school where I was working and had me paged to the office. They stood there and sang Happy Birthday to me! It is a memory I will both treasure and mourn for the remainder of my days.