What a birthday becomes | Ammi Midstokke

Today is my birthday.

While the significance of birthdays differs for everyone, they’ve always been a big deal in my family.

I would monopolize the whole month if I didn’t have to share it with so many other family birthdays. Instead, I stuff birthday-week with as much gluttony as possible in all forms: adventuring, decadently long massages, cake, fresh flowers, second cups of coffee and reflection.

I also try to do something numerically related, but as I get older, it requires mathematical creativity. Which is why I swam 4,800 meters on Monday morning.

There will be some 4.8-mile runs, perhaps a 48-mile bike ride, and at least 48 ounces of cake consumed.

Forty-eight is a good number, because it is what comes after 47, which is surely the most embarrassing number.

I have been ashamed to share it this whole year, and like many of you, concerned it could be possible to be stuck on 47 forever. But time, and thus age, are unstoppable forces to all of us.

For once, that makes me hopeful.

What no one told me about aging is how humiliating the small wins become.

I was glowing all day last week after the mammogram technician told me I had a lot of muscle. At 48, maintaining muscle mass is a full-time job of alternately eating dead animals, hoisting heavy things and smearing testosterone cream on one patch of skin, while smearing Bengay on another.

I try to be mindful of all the things I can still do, which is pretty much everything I’ve always done, except drinking alcohol or staying up past 9 p.m.

I do most of the things slower, but with equal commitment and conviction, except when I replace them with naps.

I was recently feeling grateful that I can still run.

Some of my friends have been relegated to e-bikes and elliptical machines, and I know they pretend they’re still having a good time, but I have my doubts.

When I can no longer run, I plan on taking up new hobbies I don’t have time for yet: crocheting afghans from acrylic yarn in obscene colors I find at the thrift store, and harassing teenagers for jaywalking.

Running still takes me to secret places, like a nearby gully where the coyotes live and I often see their fluffy pups trotting to the cover of the birch trees.

The lupine are just beginning to bloom here, an explosion of purple spray, and any day now the honeysuckle will drop their coral petals into the air.

These forthcoming weeks are among my favorite every year, a glimpse of nature doing what she has always done and will always do, long after my annual contemplative birthday runs have become a thing of the past. Time is one of the few comforts I seem to have these days.

Rounding a corner in the mosquito-thick lowlands, my friend, Tom, came blazing by on an intersecting trail.

For as long as I have known Tom (all of my adult life and more), he has run. Which means I must have another few decades of running ahead of me, too.

Like nature’s constancy, his gait trodding up the road or through the woods is a touchstone. As we came to a stop, we both dutifully raised our watches to pause them.

Before words had even left our mouths, we made sure that we took the opportunity to stop time, lest our 12-minute miles be inaccurately recorded as 13-minute miles.

I wondered when we’ll stop measuring our decline.

As if the slow forming of what can only be referred to as “jowls” on my face is not enough evidence, I seem to need data to confirm what I already know.

Where birthdays were once a celebration of individual achievement, a reflection on time past, and often a social measuring stick, they have changed for me.

Now, they seem to be a rhythmic, reverent passage of time and its inevitable healing, and a humble awareness of all that is given to us by the grace of the universe.

The birthday itself is the gift.

Ammi Midstokke can be reached at ammim@spokesman.com