Birthday #60

  

Mrs. Chatterbox is slightly older than me; she turned 60 three weeks ago. Since then I’ve pretended I was a younger man consorting with a cougar. But yesterday was my birthday. Now I’m S-I-X-T-Y, and taking solace in a post I wrote back in my younger days, when I was a mere 59:

      

There are benefits to not being good with numbers and I’m reaping one right now. I thought this was the year I hit the big 60 but I now realize it’s only my fifty-ninth birthday, which I thought I’d celebrated last year. Because I have difficulty accessing that part of my brain where mathematics lurks like a creepy spider I get another year before leaving behind my fifties. Twelve months that I thought I’d spent but hadn’t. Quite a gift, but what should I do with it?

     

Those who know me well have little difficulty believing me capable of such a mistake. In school I was a dullard at math; numbers were just beginning to make sense when the government instigated something called “New Math,” to help us compete with the Russians, who’d recently launched Sputnik and were about to take over the world and make us drink vodka and eat stinky black fish eggs.

      

Actually, people tell me I look much younger than I am. Either they’re just being nice or there are benefits to having a fat face—fat puffs out the wrinkles. If I start losing weight I’ll look like a deflating zeppelin. But there’s another reason I’m often mistaken for someone younger: I possess a disarming sense of immaturity that is so rare in one my age that it’s often mistaken for youth. In short, I’m childish, and I work hard at staying that way.

      

I ended the post last year with this paragraph: 

    

So what should I do with this extra year? Skydiving? The only way to get me to jump

out of a plane is to set it on fire. Learn another language? I haven’t mastered or done much with this one. Oh wait, of course! I know what I’ll do, if I can summon the nerve. I’ve never done anything like it before and it will be f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c….

      

Last year I did manage to accomplish my goal of doing something fantastic and I’d love to tell you what it was, but as many of you know my wife and son both work for the local police department. Many of our men in blue read Chubby Chatterbox. I can’t admit what I did because technically…it wasn’t legal.