I have pretty much listened to this song once a week since I moved to Los Angeles but on the day of my 28th birthday I feel like I’m right there where Loudon was when he wrote this.

20 years ago I would stay awake all night in anticipation of birthdays. I would lay there and premptively tear open gifts in the dark of my room. I would entertain all of my fantasies of having a day that belonged to me and whisper the words “It’s my day” . . my birthday . . I would lord it over the world as though no other human being was born on August 27th. Then the years tick by and I find myself sleeping very soundly until my eyes open up to the beginning of a 29th year. Shower, coffee, cereal, HBO catchup . . . a quiet but confident beginning.

I will let my dads words do the work here. He sent an email this morning:

“After a lifetime of saying happy birthday to children, friends, and strangers, the words take on a different tone. What they really mean, at least where our loved ones are concerned, is “I am so happy that you are on this earth” and in the case of children, there is that loving added subtext of “And I am so delighted that I had something to do with that fact.” And so what we are celebrating over and over again is august 27, 1981, a very very good and propitious day because it was a convergence of a great number of things that produced the possibility and the actuality of you. . . . Birthdays should NOT be a day when we ponder the relentless and unstoppable tick-tick-tocking of time; what they should be is a celebration of the happy accident that is us.”

Thank you dad and thank you world for putting up with me thus far. I look forward to all the other trouble we can get ourselves in together.

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