I just had a birthday. Let me correct that: I just had ANOTHER birthday. Before you start congratulating me on getting through another year with most of my hair and a fair amount of my own teeth intact, let me tell you that I wasn’t particularly excited about the occasion. In fact, I would have been happy to have slept the entire time. On the other hand, I feel like this most days.

Do not misunderstand. I am not one of those men who are so afraid of growing old that they would wring the neck of the sweet bird of youth until its eyes popped out. You know who I’m talking about, that jerk at the stoplight in the red Miata with the top down and the Greek formula dripping down the side of his face. He’s got a cell phone pressed to his ear, probably talking to his plastic surgeon about his impending facelift or his personal trainer about getting rid of those love handles drooping over the sides of his Calvins. Oops, I have to go, twenty-year-old girlfriend on the other line. Thank goodness for call waiting and vitamin E.

Why go to all the trouble to stay young when growing old requires so little effort? I have had youth, and if my memory of aging serves me correctly, it seems that I spent most of my time sitting around wishing I were older.

Birthday or not, I’m not going to dye my hair. I’m not going to join a health club. And the only plastic surgery I’ll ever have will probably involve a pair of scissors and a Home Depot card maxed out. I wouldn’t mind a red Miata and a cell phone, though. Every man needs a toy or two.

My birthday apathy has nothing to do with aging. I just don’t see the point in celebrating the anniversary of what was arguably the most traumatic day of my life.

Fortunately, God blocks the memory of our births from our minds because he knows it would be too much for us mere mortals to handle. We blame our mothers for enough. Why blame them for our eviction in this biological dispute between landlord and tenant?

We can only imagine what it must have been like. There you are, minding your own business, your dog splashing around in the dark. He is nice and warm, safe, welcoming. Then – BAM! Someone unplugs your parents’ wave pool and all hell breaks loose!

You are thrown headfirst into an unbelievably bright place where a hysterical woman is yelling at a poor man who has passed out on the floor, calling him horrible names, accusing his parents of never having married. Suddenly you’re hung upside down and slapped on the butt by someone claiming to be a licensed member of the medical profession! What kind of voodoo medicine is this, you wonder? If anyone should get slapped it’s that screaming hysterical woman, certainly not you.

I suppose we should be thankful that being hung upside down while naked and flogged on the butt never became a widely practiced tradition. I understand that there are places in the larger cities where you can get such treatment if you wish, though I have no personal knowledge of this myself.

This birthday was my 37th, which means I have another three years before I reach that age commonly known as “The Big Four-O.” The “O” stands for “Ominous”. It’s all downhill from here, bubba.

In the grand scheme of things, forty is the hump day of life.

Forty is the age when your friends and co-workers come up to you and say wonderfully warm things like, “Your life is half over!” and “You really look great for someone your age!”

Thanks dear friends. Thank you very much.

They decorate your office with black streamers and black balloons and give you black flowers and a black coffee mug that says “Older Than Dirt” on one side and “Excuse me while I break down” on the other. They put a black birthday hat on your head (the elastic band fits nicely under your jowls) and shove a black noisemaker into your mouth and expect you to smile and act graceful as they mock your mortality.

That’s when you realize that attending your own fortieth birthday party is a lot like attending your own funeral. The only difference is that funeral food is usually better.

As you struggle to blow out the forty black candles that quickly reach bonfire status atop your black cake, you hope there isn’t a seventy-year-old stripper waiting in the wings.

Then it’s time for the obligatory singing of “Happy Birthday To You,” done “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” style, by a bunch of well-meaning idiots who couldn’t carry a tune in a paper bag.

And the whole time you’re thinking, “Where did I put my AK47?”

It is a documented fact that most disgruntled postal workers become disgruntled shortly after their fortieth birthday. It is not difficult to find out why.

As always, I tried to keep this birthday a secret. I didn’t want anyone to congratulate me on my “big day”, not my co-workers, not my close friends, and certainly not those damn singing bartenders at TGIFridays. I embarrass myself enough during the course of a normal day. I do not need help.

There was a party waiting for me when I got home (I have no control over what happens there). It was a quiet affair, just my wife and kids and my dog ​​(the cat had a previous engagement). There were streamers and balloons hanging across the dining room, and the table was perfectly set with paper plates and plastic forks, courtesy of my nine-year-old daughter who fancies herself the Martha Stewart of high school.

My youngest insisted that we all wear Barney and Baby Bop birthday hats while eating our bucket of birthday chicken. Fortunately, my wife forgot to buy film for the camera. A thirty-seven-year-old man in a Barney birthday hat with chicken fat running down his chin doesn’t exactly qualify as a Kodak moment.

Unless, of course, you’re sitting in a red Miata.