Tempus Fugit

It's funny how we measure time. A year, obviously, is a fairly straightforward measure of time even if you know nothing about the heliocentric solar system and a month makes perfect sense as well and so on, but the fixing of a moment in time, such as, for example, the early hours of the morning in Vancouver on March 15th, 1982, as special and significant is sort of strange, when you think about it. I can go back, if I wish-though for some reason I never have-and find out what people were reading in their morning paper as I made my first appearance, squalling and mewling, into the world. I can find out who died that day, who else was also making their debuts, as it were, at the same time I was. I know what the weather was like, because my father's told me that it was a beautiful spring morning when he left the hospital.

Obviously, there wasn't anything special or significant about that day for most people. People got up, went to work, and school, and turned on the television, and argued and talked and fell in love and despaired and got drunk and fell asleep, soundly or not, like any other day. Nothing of particular import happened that particular Ides of March in the world of History with a capital H-it's been a quiet couple of millenia for the date, with the exception of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in 1917. It was, as far as I can tell, an ordinary day.

Except, of course, for me, and my family, and however many other people there are who made their entrances (and exits, I suppose) on the stage we all ab lib our way across that day twenty four years ago. Like any anniversary, my birthday is simultaneously meaningless-yeah, it was exactly twenty-four years ago that I was born, and what does this have to do with the price of fish?-and one of those moments for stock-taking and so forth that seem to crop up every year.

Enough of the navel-gazing. It's a beautiful spring day, and I want to walk around in it. So Happy Birthday to me, and to Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Eva Longoria and Harold Baines and Ry Cooder and Finnish snowboarder Antii Autti and even to you, Jimmy Swaggart. One more year to the quarter-century...