Birthday Note

Today marks my 58th year on the planet, another way of saying that it's my birthday, and there is less reflection on how I've spent my years than before, replaced, I suppose, but a low-murmuring astonishment that I'm still here, breathing, writing, whining, celebrating, arguing , laughing along with the rest of the community. It's not that I'm about to go soft in the head and the heart and profess reams of  steamy, flatulent prose about being grateful and such--even when I understand the awesomeness of an occasion, confessions of unending thanks make me instinctively--but I would like to briefly remark that at one point in my life I didn't expect to live this long. Good fortune intervened in my travels, however, and one might say that I am over two decades past what I expected to live until; that fact still astonishes me , the profundity of the fact has never escaped my thinking. It's in view of this fact that I go forward with what little real humility I have , secure in the knowledge that the miracle that I might have been waiting for in the past has already happened, and ,indeed, continues to unfold.