There is no refuting it; once you get to enough birthdays the numbers start to feel a little random. There are just so many of them! And what kind of meaning does a person want to attach to even a fairly even number like sixty, let alone, I don't know, 62, or 59?
Are these interesting questions?
Not particularly.
But I am turning sixty too! And so I think about age, and these numbers, and yet I can't quite get them to be all that interesting.
On Grape's birthday, which is today, we like to reminisce about some happy times with him; a summer of miniature golf for instance, or crashing a car, swimming with hundreds of sharks or taking peyote. And so we need not particularly dwell on numbers. But that said, today I don't have much of a story. The time I am thinking about was too sweet, too complicated and yet simple for that, but fortunately I do have something else pertaining to that time in my bag of tricks.
Anyway, the period I have been thinking of was when he was a best man at my wedding and came out to Chicago, where myself and friends and some family had taken over the house of a friend of my mom in the lead-up to the best and most essential day of my life. It was a few days of drinking and midnight swimming in Lake Michigan, assembling a wedding outfit, and generally wandering the city. It was a moment of calm sweetness, all of its own thing. I have a picture of Grape from this time, 1991, so maybe he doesn't look exactly like this today. We are on the grass, by the lake. He is lying on me.
Despite the fact that this was merely a snapshot, if you click the picture, well...
He comes alive, like when I remember the time.
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