Do what you have to do - for Gilad

Days of Our Lives [1]. It’s a marathon US TV soapie. It began in 1965, and it’s still going. I can’t recall seeing even one episode of it, but I must have because its sombre opening voiceover’s imprinted in my memory: ‘Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives’ [2]. Indeed. It’s easy to forget that for each of us the sand runs down; and once down it doesn’t go back up. Absorbed in the hurly-burly hustle of whatever it is we do, it often takes birthdays, anniversaries and other life milestones to bring us back to reality. To make us realise what’s important. The coming Saturday is Gilad Shalit’s 24th birthday [3]. When he was kidnapped by Hamas 1,523 days ago, on 25 June 2006, he was aged 19. So this is his fifth birthday in captivity. For every single one of these 1,523 days Hamas has held him incommunicado. Totally illegally. Inhumanely. Abhorrently. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has launched a global campaign asking people to send Gilad greetings for his 24th birthday. The greetings will be presented to the International Committee of the Red Cross for delivery to Gilad [4]. I normally avoid online campaigns. But this one’s exceptional. If you also identify with Gilad, click here [5] and do what you have to do. None of us knows how much sand’s left to run through our hourglass. Gilad knows even less of his.

Farmdoc's 63rd birthday musings

Today’s my birthday. My 63rd birthday. My 23,011th day. My birthdays are days when I look back as well as forwards.

Looking back, here are the Farmdoc’s Blog posts for my 61st [1] and 62nd [2] birthdays. I’m hard pressed to define my life’s trajectory in the past 365 days. Overall, I think, it’s been more of the same. No big changes. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Or not. But that’s what it’s been. Which is okay if I’m happy and content. And by and large I have been. And am.

Today I’m working in the clinic; thanks to recent rain and sun there’s still edible pasture grass so feeding out hay’s not yet begun for 2010 (other than the round bale I wrote of yesterday); and tonight there’s Fire Brigade training. When I was younger my birthdays were special days. I wished each one would never end. And I was sad when it inevitably did. Nowadays my birthdays are normal days. Indeed I’m grateful for, and I cherish, that normality.

As to the future, I can do no better than reiterate what I wrote last 9 June: I’m just a guy trying to live decently in an exceptionally beautiful place, and trying to tread lightly on a troubled and imperilled planet. I’m not doing so well on either count. I am fortunate to be able to try, though. Doubly so, for I know how fortunate I am. Yes. I’m truly happy to be alive.

Happy birthday to me.

P.S. I don’t apologise for this self-absorption. This pensive solipsism. For if a blogger can’t indulge in it on his birthday, then when can he?

farmdoc's blog post number 415

Today’s my birthday. My 62nd birthday. Here are some of my thoughts on this day:

I’m happy to be alive.

I’m quite old. I hope I have a quarter of my life span yet to live. But who knows?

I once calculated I’d be 52-years-old at the turn of the century. And this century’s now over 9-years-old.

I’m six years older than my dad was when he died.

My health is reasonable. I’m having my annual blood tests at the end of this month. I should do more walking, bike riding, and wood cutting/splitting/stacking.

I’m doing the best quality work I’ve ever done. When it comes time for me to quit work, I hope I make that decision rather than have it foisted upon me.

I’m not seeing Sweetheart Vivienne or any of my darling children and grandchildren today. But I hope to speak with them on the phone. Including my youngest daughter far away in the US.

No candles for me today. And no cake.

I’m spending today doing mundane things, including preparing for work in the clinic tomorrow, writing supplementary medical reports, feeding hay to the goats and sheep, feeding Pete the Maremma, and collecting mail from the Post Office.

I share my birthday with composer Cole Porter, US politician Robert McNamara, actors Michael J Fox and Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman, cricketer Andrew Symonds, West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, writer Patricia Cornwell, and locomotive inventor George Stephenson. Also Donald Duck.

I’m just a guy trying to live decently in an exceptionally beautiful place, and trying to tread lightly on a troubled and imperilled planet. I’m not doing so well on either count.

I am fortunate to be able to try, though. Doubly so, for I know how fortunate I am.

Yes. I’m truly happy to be alive.

farmdoc's blog post number 240

I’m relieved I won’t be there. Not because I don’t want to be there. But because I couldn’t bear it. Today Lucy Same, my mother-in-law, turns 84 years old. And she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t know anymore what a birthday is. It’s a pity. A tragedy. It tears my heartstrings to see this formerly intelligent, articulate and interested woman reduced to this. By that horrid disease she has. I wouldn’t wish dementia on my worst enemy. I definitely wouldn’t. I used to have a fine mother-in-law. I know I’ve never been the type of husband she envisioned for her darling only daughter. But before she disappeared into her cognitive fog she always treated me decently and respectfully. Even lovingly. And she adored our darling children and grandchildren. I thank her for all that. I haven’t thanked her up to now. And today, when I want to, she can’t receive my thanks. When I visit her, I see her dozing, sitting, eating, drinking. Sometimes her face is expressive, sometimes blank. Sometime expressing appropriate emotion, mostly not. To wish her ‘Happy Birthday’ seems the ultimate banality. So what do I wish her today? I don’t know. Given her personal cataclysm, I suspect the most appropriate way of acknowledging her birthday is by remembering what she was like before. And quietly shedding a tear.

farmdoc's blog post number 50

Happy Birthday to You, according to Guinness World Records, is the most popular song in the English language. Its melody comes from a song Good Morning to All written in 1893 by two Kentucky kindergarten teachers, Patty and Mildred Hill, as a ditty their young students could easily remember and sing. Indeed the Hills’ students made up the words to Happy Birthday to You and sang them to the tune of Good Morning to All. The combined melody and lyrics were first published in 1912. The song has been translated into over 18 languages, but it’s mostly sung in English. It was first copyrighted in 1935. In 1998 Warner Chappell, part of The Time-Warner Corporation, paid US$15m for the company owning the copyright. Warner Chappell – which reportedly charges US$10,000 for use of the song in for-profit situations, resulting in royalties of about US$2m per year – claims that the US copyright expires in 2030 until when public performances of the song are technically illegal unless royalties are paid. But recent legal opinion doubts that the US copyright remains valid. Anyway singing it in private is free – as is singing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, which is in the public domain and, incidentally, is the second most popular song in the English language. Today is the 61st anniversary of my birth. Happy birthday to me.