Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday. I turned 36. I felt 49. My birthday fell in the trough between an endoscopy and the biopsy results. So naturally I was in a reflective mood.

What did I do for my birthday? Sat in five hours of meetings. Went for a walk in the evening. Played with my son, put him in the tub and then yanked him out. Felt old and frail. Thought about the pictures of my esophagus, a pink cone whose tapering interior was etched with livid red stripes. In my mind it was something tender and beautiful, this esophagus, this place where despite my best efforts the fear and rage had manifested as fiery tendrils. It seemed like poetic justice to me that my lifelong (and mostly successful) effort to be tough had been undermined by this soft little tube inside me.

As I pushed the stroller in the blustery evening vague thoughts of transformation flitted through my mind. Now and then my reverie was interrupted by my son's emphatic nomenclature: "bird", "flag," doggie."

I fell asleep reading an essay by Pushkin about a Cossack rebel. Pushkin's prose is pretty awful but it was the only Pushkin the library had. The library also has no Grass, one Hesse, and two Nabokovs. Presumably they have an entire shelf of Steven King. So ended the 36th.