h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah....
41
forty-one!
FORTY-TATTERING-WUN!

What do it mean?

I mean, really, what do it mean?

Another twitch on the odometer?

Another 365 calender squares down the toilet?

Four sticky decades and a year...

Forty years ago, I was still a babe...

and I had a leetle bother just borneded two weeks before...

we're eleven and half munths apart...

We look alike, we talk alike, and we haven't talked or looked at each other in years.

We spent the fifteen years crammmed together. Then I split.

We ended up in Austin together and ended up living together, again.

Urf!

Forty-one years.

Not too old, not too young. Not just right.

I was borneded on the eve of war and here I sit, on the eve again.

Some things never change.

1962 was a long time ago and yet it was yesterday.

I don't remember it, but I've spent a long time looking it up.

Jimi Hendrix was out of the Army and playing weddings.

Buddy Holly was still fresh in memory.

Elvis was in the Army.

The Beatles were still goofing around in Hamburg...for the last time...

Kuwait and Iraq and Yemen and a whole host of former colonies were new countries...

Kennedy was still trying to figure out whether Nixon got the better part of the deal.

Castro was smiling.

My father had a very short haircut and glasses that would make Lisa Loeb proud.
He was driving a ... I think it was a Beetle or a big ugly Chevy... I'll have to ask.

I'm trying to cast back to my earliest memory, now...
and I can't seem to go back further than when I was about three...

my mom went to answer the door and she was ironing...
and I was just tall enough to reach up and place my hand, I can't remember which one, flat on the bottom of the iron...
and screaming...
there was a second time that I burned a hand, when I was a bit older, when I rolled into some live ashes at the bottom of a construction site trash heap... I think that was the left hand...

and then, a couple of years ago, in a factory job, I got some molten aluminium alloy down a glove on my right hand and now I have a scar from that...

ugh...
Forty-one years of bruises, scars, burns, scratchs, splinters...bumps...
then there was when I was fifteen and I discovered...
ooo, there's a lovely thought...
I'll linger on that a bit...








still lingering...



linger, linger, linger....


I think I'll stay here a while....

Oops! Bye!

Congratulations, Birthday Boy
I'm sorry it's a late wish
Karen

Oh!

Did you know that life starts at 42?


congrats!

Here, I am, tripping along,
believing you be an intelligent gent,
and you cometh uppeth witheth a line like that!


Thanks!