Anniversaries, Birthdays and Other Celebrations
Ah, July 4th!
It is Independence Day, here in the United States, and this year the country is celebrating its 250th birthday!
That certainly a pretty cool deal and I'm sure there will be lots of barbecues, fireworks and an explosion of red, white and blue everywhere. Sadly, it's a gray day here, but so it goes.
For no particular reason, I found myself contemplating the fact that I had not even been born yet (by 7 years) when my native Denmark celebrated 1,000 years as a unified Kingdom. I had been born (interestingly enough, by 7 years) when the city of Copenhagen celebrated its 800th anniversary.
I'm not saying these things to brag about anything, nor as a way to diminish the importance of the USA's 250th birthday but just to offer a sense of perspective in the greater scale of things.
To be honest, I've never been big into birthdays and celebrations, including my own, because I've always felt like I have better things to do with my life.
Even when I was a little kid, I mostly avoided dealing with my birthday... I think because I didn't like the way it always drew attention to me and I didn't like having attention drawn to myself. I preferred being "invisible."
Many years later, when I worked in a corporate situation, most people at the office never even knew when my birthday was and so I managed to circumvent the eternal attempts at festivity that most people didn't really seem to care about... but put up with, to keep the peace. I suppose I could say "but at least there was cake" but most of the time the cake wasn't even worth eating!
Maybe that all makes me sound rather like a Debbie Downer, and I certainly don't intend to be. I guess I just have different priorities than most people.
Of all the birthdays that occurred in the course of a year I think I enjoyed my dad's the most. Not because it was a celebration, per se, but because I really liked the food we would have, and I really liked the fact that in the afternoon of his birthday everybody would pile in their cars and we would drive off to the local woods to look for chanterelle mushrooms.
Perhaps a strange thing for a small child to be interested in but finding things — as I have alluded to before —has always been one of my favorite pastimes.
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend!
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2026.07.04 01:28 PDT
1585/2849
Never been all that interested in my birthday either. Guess because it falls on a major holiday. So was always over shadowed when a kid. Now could care less. Neat that you enjoyed hunting mushrooms. Never had the patience or the eyes for it myself.