Birth Day

The morning that I was born in a Kansas farmhouse on a snowy morning in 1978, my parents called in a request to the local rock 'n' roll radio station. My mother had spent a portion of her pregnancy listening to AM Gold and participating in call-in contests. The deejay probably knew her by voice. To every listener tuned to his signal amplitude, the deejay announced that the Cases didn't have a turkey on Thanksgiving but "a bouncing baby boy." I was there, but I don't remember any of it. What was I doing to have been so inattentive?

When my friend Mike turned forty-five (he's in his sixties now), he asked friends to come over and bring him 45rpm records as gifts. He dragged out an old suitcase record player and they had a party, rockin' and rollin' till the break of dawn (or maybe more like 10 PM, because adults often have jobs to get to). For my birthday celebration, I won't be doing anything quite so socially involved, nor so musical. I'm just hoping to enjoy some pumpkin pie and leisure reading. Mike, my mother, and my godson, will all visit me on Friday afternoon, which should be wonderful.

So here's a question that keeps coming to me: how's a forty-five-year-old "supposed" to think and act? Now isn't the first time I've asked how my mind is similar to those of the average adult in middle age. Or, going in the opposite direction, what similarity is there between me now and fifteen-year-old Byron, a person so distant that I no longer have access to his perspective? Can we even be considered the same person? Is a shared love for coffee enough? Except for in the structure of our DNA, we're different in almost every way. A thought experiment: if it were somehow possible to put someone in a room with their younger self, what would they have to talk about? We share the same birth, the same parents, and the same childhood experiences, yet I'm confident that young Byron would hate me, and I'd just pity him. Who am I, if not him? And yet, who else would I be? Turning another year older has me thinking a lot about self and nonself in the continuum that is life. The Buddha famously raised the issue of nonself in a talk to the five ascetics that he hung out with before he found enlightenment. (They became his first students – the earliest sangha, or Buddhist community.) He said that the five parts of selfhood – embodiment, feelings, perception, will, and consciousness – fool us, with their irresistible allure, into thinking that self exists. But there is no fixed, constant self, just a long series of variations on a theme, merely echoes and iterations. What a fifty- or sixty-year-old Byron might be like, how he might view the world, I can't even imagine. There are too many variables. Futures branch out with every moment, in a perpetually widening tree of possible realities. The theme evolves, succumbs to entropy. All lights burn out in the end. This, too, gives me pause.

Forty-five years old. Forgive me for not dancing.