So little cake for so many candles | Off the Record - Chico Enterprise-Record

As the 39th anniversary of my 21st birthday looms closer by the day I have to admit Shakira is right. The hips don’t lie. For that matter neither do the knees. Or the lower back. Or the brain.

I mean seriously I can remember the words to every hit song of 1981 — care to sing a few bars of “Jesse’s Girl,” “Boy from New York City,” “Bette Davis Eyes,” “9 to 5” or “Angel of the Morning” with me? — but I can’t remember once I get up from the chair — which takes more effort and involves more creaking and popping than it did on the 29th anniversary of my 21st birthday — why the heck I got up in the first place.

The only advantage to these age-related memory glitches is that jokes can be funny more then once, and sometimes I get to do things all over again for the first time.

When you turn 20 for the third time doctors really start to nag about getting at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. Hey, no problem. I got that covered. I do at least 30-minutes of “get ups” a day. I get up from bed. I get up from various chairs. I get up (and down) stairs. In addition to my “get ups” I’m also pushing 60, which, as Mark Twain said, is “enough exercise for me.”

It just doesn’t feel like I went from zero to 60 in 1,893,417,120 seconds. It feels a lot faster. I’ll go to bed tomorrow night a quinquagenarian and wake up a sexagenarian on Monday. I look at it as going from being a really good Scotch to being a great Scotch. Cheers!

It was 37 degrees and there were 11-inches of snow on the ground in Louisville, Kentucky the day I was born. In the ensuring 525,600 hours a lot of things have happened.

Valium (a.k.a. “mothers little helper”) hit the market as did non-dairy creamer (cows around the country revolted). Pull tabs started appearing on soda can; Easy-Bake and counter-top microwave ovens hit the market; Kevlar became the bullet-proof fashion wear material; Star Trek (the original series) aired; the first heart transplant was successful (well sort of, the patient lived for 18 days); and the first man stepped on the Moon. And that was just in the first decade of my life.

I have also seen the advent of waffle-sole running shoes, the electronic ignition, barcodes, global warming, personal computers, computer viruses and the world wide web, Prozac, predator and recreational drones, DVDs, hybrid cars, the international space station, cell phones, Facebook, Google, GPS and the iPhone.

And not for nothing but the same day I become a sexagenarian Hanna Barbera’s Tom and Jerry become octogenarians making me feel not so old after all.

In my lifetime vaccines for Lyme disease, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, pneumonia, chicken pox, rubella, mumps and measles were developed. The first test-tube baby was born; Dolly the sheep became the first cloned animal; and scientists successfully sequenced the complete genome of a woolly mammoth.

What did I do? I lived, loved and, apparently, according to my best calculations slept a total of 20 years of the last 60. Not as monumental as say the ratification of the 25th Amendment which occurred on my birthday in 1967 but still significant in my life. Twenty years? I slept 20 years? Geez now that I have fewer years in front of me then behind me those 20 years of sleeping seems like such a waste especially since I’m tired all the time. Sigh.

I clearly remember and was part of the civil rights and women’s movements and the changes they wrought in our society, in our culture. And I have to say I am most thoroughly disgusted that not only have we not come a long way baby but we are regressing. And, for 45 of my 60 years on the planet the United States has been in one or another war. But, I’m not going to let any of this get me down, mostly because it’s just getting too darn hard to get up again.

So while there’s so little cake for so many candles at this stage in life, I get the biggest kick out of people saying things to me like: “Sixty is the new 45!” (Yeah? And I’m really Miss America) and “You still have plenty of time to follow your dreams.”

Yeah. Maybe. But I have to say I’m a bit weary of following those dreams to the tune of about 7, 500 steps a day for 21,900 days. I’m a little tired of looking at the rear end, the backside of those dreams. I think I’m just gonna save myself some aggravation and ask those ding-dang dreams where they’re going and meet up with them later but, not too much later. With age comes wisdom.

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