Happy Birthday...To You.

Simulblogging
I really don’t have a lot of time to write today, so if you’ll forgive the cross-pollenization, this is a simulblog; I’m posing identically, both to All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us and Pull My Fang Finger.

This is a note directed at you who for the most part only know me as that goofy guy who wears his heart on his sleeve via his mostly sappy-yet-passionate, personal and/or hockey-related blog posts. And hopefully, you also know that I don’t take a lot of things for granted; usually going a bit overboard in my effusiveness on the various subjects I’m passionate about.

So if my PMFF readers will forgive the off-topic nature of this missive, the main reason I’m double-posting today is because I don’t want to miss anybody; I want to let all of my friends, both on Facebook, Twitter, and throughout the blogosphere, know how much I appreciate you, and how humbled I am at the many Birthday good wishes I’ve received this morning.

Yep, today is my birthday, the day I officially climb into the rarefied air of my mid-fifties. I turn 54 today, so I can no longer say with any conviction that I’m just in my ‘early’ 50s. And that’s kinda significant for people who are still in their 20s and 30s, because if they’re anything like me (and I’m pretty confident they are), they look at you pretty differently after you hit the half-century mark, and even more so as you inch closer to 60 — that magical age when everyone more-or-less officially becomes ‘old.’

I’m pretty confident that I’m as good an example as anyone in confirming the notion that ‘you’re only as old as you feel.’ And I do NOT feel any different now than I did, when I was half my current age. Oh yeah, my body reminds me — often — that I’m no longer that 20 or even 30 year-old who used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease as a gymnast, but it still hasn’t convinced me that I’m not the same person.

I only wish someone would tell that to the prospective employers who've apparently been casting my resumes into the circular file after discerning my age from viewing my job history.

Nevertheless I am indeed wiser for the years that evermore quickly seem to pass, which only intensifies my acknowledgment of the wisdom plied by George Bernard Shaw when he penned the lyric, “Love, like youth is wasted on the young.”

However, I know my love has not been wasted, nor my youth for that matter. It has taken me through a lot of stupidity and halfhearted attempts at self-definition, into a wonderful balance of accomplishment and failure; enough of both so as to fully appreciate the difference between the two; never, ever forgetting the path that brought me here.

I love my life, and the people who’ve allowed me to live it so well.

Thank you, my friends, for making this birthday and each one hereafter, a true reason for me to celebrate.

Cheers.

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finis