The achey haze of dates.

I am not very good with dates... I can remember my own birth date, that of my mother and sister and brother but it pretty much ends there. There are a couple other dates whose numbers have been burned in my brain like a branding. The numbers pass like faces on a totem poll I must climb and gaze upon every month and every year. It is cyclical like a clock before time was digitalized.

29 is a number that means death, reminding me of my own mortality and of those around me, like ants in a chain, a breeze could sweep one of us away. 12 is a number that’s marred with hope and reality, like a mirror dropped in the salty bluff mud of South Carolina. I pick it up and look...I am not sure if what I see is my reflection.

So these numbers pass on the calendar like any other.

At a party once, I was the only undrunk one. I held my coke in a red plastic cup and told no one of the lack of rum. In a room fool of drunken people it doesn’t take long before you start doubting the laws of thermodynamics. A man sat down next to me and recited me a poem about how each year we unknowing pass the anniversary of our death. There is no point to this story, except to say that every day is an anniversary for whatever happened last year and a pre-anniversary for whatever will happen the next.

As my graduation anniversary was soon approaching (and now passed) I have been thinking more and more in terms of “what was I doing at this time last year?” Right after my oldest brother died I did this type of thing too: “This time last year I knew nothing about death, living without knowing this was going to happen.” I look back on who I was and what I did not know and feel older and bit wiser, sometimes a bit sadder. Sometimes I see i have more reasons to hope stuffed into my pockets... Every time knowing that a year from now I will be looking at who I am now and feeling the same way.

I spoke to homeless man today with my friend. He said some profound things. One of them was. “I’m blessed to be alive. I wake up each morning and say Thank you.” That’s true for every number of the month. I ought to think about those things more often rather than worrying about what outfit will pass for business casual, or if i will make it to the gym time.



Sidedish:

The gym is everywhere.

A man doing pushups on the curb at 7:30... his feet stretched out into the street, his hands on the curb. The other day I was at a bus stop and man was doing pushing using the bus stop bench. I walked from the farmer's market and used my sack of potatoes and flat bread and green beans as weights.