Confab-ulous!
So I had a big-ass birthday party at my house on Saturday, which was officially my 40th birthday. It was a party for a bunch of us whose birthdays landed in the same vicinity, actually, including Michael and Vince and my friend, Oz. Tiaras were worn—on-demand—by all of us birthday-thangs (I would be the "Birthday Princess" in the middle).
This one was a big deal to me, not because I hit a new decade-mark, because i've done that 3 times before. No, this one was special first and foremost because the Other Half got here last thursday morning (when we immediately proceeded to get there). I know I speak about him in superlatives quite a bit, but trust me, it just suits. He's spectacular, he's beautiful, he's smart, he's funny as fuck (Helloooo Kitty!...but that's not water-based frosting!) and he's all mine (I can show you the deed if you like).
As he and I were cleaning up the house, getting it ready for the party, I found the album that my mother had put together for me a few years ago. In it, there was a polaroid of my mom and dad, at my own father's 40th birthday party. It's a little blurred, but you get the idea. I was a wee lad of 14 then, not much younger than the Other Half is now (kidding! kinda.)
That doesn't really imbue the whole thing with a sense of dread and age, so much as it provides a comfort in the continued march of generations. That I am so much like my father, so lucky to have so many wonderful friends and loved ones around me. That I like to think I am, at least a times, worthy as he is of so much good fortune and so much love. That his was (and continues to be) the most effective way of instructing: by example. That all those "that"s came together on Saturday in my old house that has become "our" new house, a house newly re-opened to friends and friends of friends after so long of being shuttered out and down.
So my 40th birthday stands as a beginning of a new era, of sorts. A return to the better parts of who I have been and the adventure, with the man I love, of figuring out what comes next, of who and what I'm capable of being.
And just in case you were wondering, the only time I felt old was when I was browsing the Other Half's iPod, by Genre, and discovered that he'd classified the Counting Crows as "Adult Contemporary".