Thoughts on reaching 75

“He not busy being born is busy dying”
- It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding)’ by Bob Dylan

I don’t acknowledge birthdays. To me seems frivolous at best; haunting at worst. But making an exception for 75 which is a fair milestone, one I’ve been lucky to reach.

Why haunting? My birth date March 10, 1945, always congers up the Dylan lyric above. While I was busy being born in a safe, clean Chicago suburban hospital, a hundred thousand Japanese were being incinerated under 1,510 tons of napalm bombs dropped on Tokyo by 282 B-29s. A million were left homeless from the disappearance of 268,000 mostly wooden homes. American airmen donned their oxygen masks at low altitude to ward off the smell of burning flesh. It was the deadliest single day of human destruction from war in history, a dubious distinction I cannot separate from my entrance to life. Try as I might, it always emerges from my psyche upon awakening to mark another birthday. I learned about it early on, staring in horror at pictures of the man-made firestorm devouring one of the world's largest cities. The book was 'Life's Picture History of WWII'. I reviewed it cover to cover at about age 7, likely the first such book I did. The Cold War was raging. McCarthy was rampaging. I feared a similar fate awaited me from nuclear Armageddon. Still do. The doomsday clock is a hundred tics from midnight, the closest in my life. That is not progress.

I resented ‘Duck & Cover’, sticking my head under the desk in grade school to survive an imaginary atomic attack. I came to realize it better to go on with your head high learning and loving and laughing, then cowering before the inevitable. That may be the most important lesson I learned in my 75 years. Onward to 76.