My birthdays in the past few decades have been largely low-key, for a few reasons:  I don’t much care if they are celebrated, I don’t have a large extended family living nearby, and my daughter and family live in Connecticut and I stay where it’s warm in March.

My daughter and I actually share a birthday.  She was born on mine in 1980.  Restaurants with ‘free breakfast on your birthday’ specials were always fun with us, and still would be if we lived closer together.

My birthdays this year and last have been far more social than usual, though, and here’s why. 

A high school classmate who lives in Florida has been hosting other classmates who live in Florida, or who are snowbirding, to her house on a late weekend in March every year.   It’s a lunch on the Saturday at her house, dinner at a restaurant on Saturday night and brunch back at her house on the Sunday.

Shows you what a magnet Florida is, doesn’t it? We’re talking about the class of 1962 from Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in Bradley, Illinois.

The calendar did its magic and my birthday, March 22, has fallen on that Florida reunion weekend for two years now, last year on the Saturday and this year on the Sunday.  I think maybe it was back when I was six and my mom invited all the cousins, yes, even the girls, when I have had so many folks singing happy birthday to me as there were last Sunday.

And all of them I have known since I was a teenager.  When does that happen these days for folks in my generation?  If you’re at a senior warehouse facility, yes they’re all your age, but your link is you’re old and you moved in a year or so ago. 

In this mobile, fragmented world we live in it is highly unusual for someone my age to be getting together with so many folks he’s known nearly 70 years to celebrate a birthday.

As I said, the calendar cooperated.  And I will admit I am happy it did. It made for a nice birthday. Thanks all.

Here we are in the photo below.  As always, I am the tallest.