Monday was my birthday and what have I got after 56 years’ battle against life’s meaninglessness? Receding hairline, expanding waistline, infrequent byline, recurring punchline: five times before, last year, and at five-year intervals before that, in birthday columns headlined, 55, 50, 40 and 35 with a Bullet, I’ve repeated the same hairline/waistline/byline joke I first made in this column when I was 30 with a Bullet.
After turning 30 “in the papers,” I decided to limit birthday columns to five-year intervals and “significant” birthdays. You assume stuff, at age 30—like your continued existence—that, at 56, you are highly aware is very chancy. On Monday, eating gluten-free birthday cake, it struck me every birthday has now become significant. At five-year intervals, my birthday columns reflected great changes: at 30, I was living in London; at 35, reeling from my father’s death; at 40, my first child had just been born; at 50, I moved from Trinidad, where I always thought I’d die, to Barbados, where my children had a better chance of living; at 55, I moved into the last house I’m likely to live in.
But those huge five-year changes are dwarfed by the one that might happen any time before I’m 60 with a Bullet; another way of saying the house I’m in now will be the last I live in is that I’ll die in that firetrucking house!
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