A NATIONAL CELEBRATION--Today, of course, we are celebrating a Great Canadian Event, the national football championship game. As everyone knows, it's in Edmonton, with the Saskatchewan Roughriders taking on the Montreal Alouettes in a contest for the Grey Cup. Millions of us, myself included, with my amazing extended family, will be watching.
But there is another great event taking place in Canada today as well, and I like to claim, more or less in a jocular way, that it is what's being celebrated in the form of The Big Game and, thus, by all of Canada.
I can say that with some confidence, too, because the Grey Cup game often falls on the same day as the second event.
I blush to say what that second event is, but there's no avoiding it, so here goes:
Today is my birthday! The day I begin yet another orbit of the sun. And, today, instead of mounting my blog's soapbox and declaiming about some failure in fairness and justice and common sense, or poking fun at this or that, I intend to indulge myself and use this space to speak about my birthday, birthdays in general, their meaning (if any), and about the matter of aging.
Myself, I'm a "Thursday's child," a child the time-honored verse says will go far. (You know, the verse that says Sunday's child is this, Tuesday's child is that, and so on.)
Well, I've already covered the question of going far with the reference to my new year getting under way by starting another circuit of the sun, which is one hell of a long way. How long? I've heard it said by experts (being the Monty Python comedy group, with its "Galaxy Song") that our globe, which spins at the rate of about 1,000 miles an hour, takes a year, travelling in orbit, to make one circuit of the sun, and it's moving at a rate of 19-or-so miles per second in so doing.
SO, EVERYBODY ON THIS PLANET is going far (and, you might say, moving fast, flying off in all directions).
Okay, maybe that's not what the Thursday's child line meant by going far. It no doubt means something like "going far in life." How far I've gone or will yet go in life is for others to say, not me.
One thing that I can state for certain about my birth is that it came at an historic time--almost exactly one month after the Great Crash of Wall Street that marked the beginning of The Great Depression.
In fact, another little joke I concocted about my birthday--that I was the first good thing to happen after the Wall Street Crash--came to my mind when I suppose I was around eight or nine years of age and the idea of what an economic depression was had finally hit me. Until then, I suppose I had thought this was the way things always were, since it was all I had known.
I learned a lot from hearing my father talk at great length about Wall Street, in a very unkindly way--somewhat, you know, the way people talk so angrily and bitterly about Wall Street today. History, it seems, does repeat.
My own childhood slowness in recognizing economic reality, such as might be expected in a well-fed-and-clothed rich kid with few worries (whom we defined as being a kid whose father had a regular job and whose kitchen had an actual fridge) was not a result of mental laxness. No, I think it was because I was a child, and, although we were economically poor, we (my brother, sister and I and our chums) always were able to find ways in East Vancouver of playing games and making up our own entertainments.
Depression or no depression, we managed to have fun. (But once we got a radio, probably from some used-furniture shop, that was heavenly, I couldn't get enough of it. Oh, I loved that old Lyric.)
IN RECOGNITION OF TODAY'S PERSONAL OCCASION, I have searched for information on the celebration of birthdays. One thing that took my eye (looking at Wikipedia) is that early Christians were against birthday celebrations because at that time birthdates were linked to astrology, considered by Christians to involve heathen and pagan beliefs, and therefore the work of the devil. Today, we look at horoscopes, most of us, just for fun.
Then I thought, well, perhaps I can find a quotation or two on birthdays from some famous writers. I have quite a number of books of quotations, yet my findings were sparse. But here's one from Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the great English poet:
"...pleas'd to look forward, pleas'd to look behind,
and count each birthday
with a grateful mind..."
That's a nice thought indeed. I lifted it from a book called 40,000 Quotations, published by Halcyon House, New York, 1937.
THEN I SEARCHED FOR QUOTATIONS on aging, since I am, with much gratitude to medical science, still enjoying the process of aging.
Here's a quote from the Bible:
"Good old age." Genesis XV, 15.
An English writer named Seymour Hicks wrote this:
"You will recognize, my boy, the first sign of age. It is when you go out into the streets...and realize for the first time how young the policemen look." Quoted in the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations.
Another Englishman, named Ronald Blythe, declared that:
"With full-span lives having become the norm, people may need to learn how to be aged as they once had to learn how to be adult." From the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Blythe had a point.
The French essayist La Rochefoucauld, in his Maxim 461, said:
"Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of life." The International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations, Copp Clark Co., Toronto, 1908 edition.
I'll try to remember that viewpoint in celebrating my birthday today.
"THE TENDENCY OF OLD AGE, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant, to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified." That's a quote from J.F. Boyse, in 40,000 Quotations. All I can say about it is, "Hear, hear!"
A writer by the name of Bonstetten has recorded these thoughts on aging: "To resist with success the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart. To keep these in parallel vigor, one must exercise, study, and love."
Now, there's a man of wisdom for you.
I have many more quotations at hand on age and aging, but too many of them are looking at the subject in a somewhat gloomy manner, and I do not believe birthdays are the sort of days that need any consideration of such sentiments. So I will end these notes on the passage of time, as represented by birthdays, with the following two gems.
"There's no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." -- George Santayana, quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, a personal selection by W.H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, 1966.
"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative." -- Attributed to Maurice Chevalier, the great French entertainer, quoted in Contemporary Quotations, 1964.
THE 1929 GREY CUP--In case I am asked, "Was there a Grey Cup, Granddad (or Great-Granddad) 'way back in 1929?" I will supply the answer now. You bet your life there was, kids. The Hamilton Tigers played the Regina Roughriders in Hamilton. Hamilton won, 14-3.
They did not hold it on my birthday that year. Probably because they hadn't yet heard of my birth, since the game was held on November 30, 1929, only two days after my birth.
I did not watch it on TV. Well, I was only two days old. But that's not the only reason I didn't watch it on TV. Nobody did. You will find this hard to believe, kids, but there was no TV then. And, you know, life still went on....
MUSN'T FORGET THE POLITICAL SCENE. In the world of politics of that day, the names I'm about to record were relatively famous.
Those in three of the top jobs, on the day I was born, were the following.
Premier of B.C., Simon Fraser Tolmie, Conservative, in office from 1928-1933.
Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Liberal, who had several terms: December, 1921 to July, 1926; September, 1926 to August, 1930, and October 1935 to November, 1948.
In the U.S., Herbert Hoover, Republican, was President.
Oh, before I head off to my party, here's your truly's horoscope for the day, courtesy The Vancouver Sun:
"Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)-- The changes going on within your personal circle may be disconcerting but, as long as you know where you belong and how you can make the most of your situation, you have nothing to fear."
Well, how hard can that be?
Happy Birthday--whenever yours may come!
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