August 6

In less than two hours, August 6 will arrive and I will have turned 18. This is supposed to be something of a rite-of-passage moment in every person's life, but I haven't seemed to fully grasp this yet -- similar to how it takes some time to accept the death of a loved one into your daily life, until it becomes something one accepts as true and not as something one has to be reminded as a truth.

I have not anticipated this day like I have for many of my previous birthdays. I remember when I was younger how I would start counting down the days and hours to the moment I could officially call myself older and add a number to my life, a countdown that always began a month in advance. As the days slowly ticked by I would have fantasies of what it would feel like to be a seven-year-old, such an auspicious age to be or a ten-year-old where, labeled with a double-digit, I could precociously imagine I could include myself with those elite few known as teenagers, the ranks of whom I would not officially join until 13.

Sweet-sixteen arrived nicely, with the stock birthday card jokes of driving tests and getting cars, only to later prove false for the next two years.

Seventeen was a kick through the door onto the threshold of adulthood: that summer I worked in the hayfield, stacking and unstacking heavy, cumbersome bales of hay. My birthday was no different, and less than an hour after waking up, before the idea of seventeen had fully sunken into my thoughts and before I even got around to eating breakfast, I had to hurry outside to help unload two wagon loads of hay into the barn. As a birthday treat, I was promised that all I would have to do was unload the two wagons, which is far preferable to loading them, and take the rest of the day off rather than work that afternoon. But, as fate would have it, that August day was extremely hot, and under the stress of moving bales of hay as fast as I could, gritting my teeth toward sweet relief for the rest of the day, I got heat exhaustion, a variance of hyperthermia. On top of the usual discomforts working with hay gives a man, my face was burning, my forehead pounded with each of my heartbeats, and my empty stomach churned uneasily. So I decided to have a glass of water and lay down to relax the pain away. This failed and I began to feel nauseous, so I locked myself in the bathroom and took a cold shower. Soon the nausea knocked me off my feet and my body still was not cooled down, so I ran a cold bath and slept in the water for at least half an hour. I drained the tub and hardly stood up to leave when I began throwing up.

There are many things I will never understand in this world, and one of them is how my stomach, completely empty but for about 12 ounces of water could produce torrents of vomit, a gallon at the least. The mess cleaned up and my stomach emptied, I dashed to my bedroom and lie down to let the body's best medicine, sleep, do its work. I woke up at 7:30 in the evening feeling much better physically but feeling a deep sense of disappointment that my 5 year vomit-free streak was broken on my seventeenth birthday, a day that I had all but slept through.

And now, 1 hour and 15 minutes to go, I reflect about how I have not counted the days or gone through any of the rituals that I once practiced, and that this eighteenth year of my existence has sneaked upon me. I know, from 17 birthdays' worth of experience (or 18, if you include the day I was actually born) that for the most part there really is no profound moment of revelation as the clock strikes midnight, no brilliant step up in my abilities as a person, no amusing ruminations about how the person I was a day ago was silly and less experienced in the world. I have not contemplated the trip to the store where I would purchase a pack of cigarettes, lottery tickets and porno mags, just for the simple fact that I can. Today I have not felt any great sense of anticipation for tomorrow or sense myself rising to the climax moment of blowing out the birthday candles on an ice cream cake and opening up gifts. In fact, today was rather uneventful and by all standards mediocre, a run-of-the-mill Sunday where the only thing I contemplate is having to get up early to go to work tomorrow morning (and it is for this reason that I dislike Sundays more than Mondays).

No day is more extraordinary than any other. Each is a day where we continue to live and, hopefully, to grow and learn. Each is one day closer to that unknown moment when we will not be blowing the candles out on a cake, but the candles of our lives have either reached the ends of their wicks and flicker out peacefully in a wrinkled pool of melted wax, or gutter and tremble in an uncontrollable gust that puts our fragile flame -- out, out. It is all fine and fun to celebrate our birthdays, but what about our deathday? Any one of the days that pass us by may be the anniversary in the future, near or far, that will be marked as our last. Shouldn't we therefore celebrate every day, live every one as if it were our last, as every one very well could be? My birthday, after all, was the death day for countless souls -- those lost in the bombing of Hiroshima as the most infamous example, along with myriad others throughout history who have died from causes both natural and macabre.

These are the musings of a young man, on the edge of eighteen, as he counts down the last fifty-three minutes of being seventeen -- anticipating the moment of magic and revelation. *He makes an early birthday wish at 11:11.* He counts down the last minutes not for the extra privileges, the cake, the presents. But for the fact that he knows he can claim this extended moment in time as his own, to look back on them with pride, and to look forward from them towards the rest of his adventure.