If Youth Knew; If Age Could

As of today, I am 24 years old. I am not a big fan of Birthdays, given that they are -- in essence -- artificial constructs. According to the Gregorian Calendar, I was born this day 24 years ago. But I doubt the Earth has gone around the sun precisely 24 times since I came out kicking and screaming at the Halifax Grace Maternity Hospital (which, fittingly, is now a parking lot on University Avenue). Nor have I passed some great watershed or birthright of sorts from which I have emerged fundamentally different from how I was before. Graduations do that. Exams do that. Job interviews do that. Trips do that. Birthdays do not.

In fact, the Birthday Grinch in me would frame it as such: yesterday, I was 8766 days old. Today, I am 8767 days old. So what?

I suppose, in the end, Birthdays are meant to be happy reminders that we are getting older, bookends to years that might otherwise mesh into each other in long, seamless string of gradually disintegrating memory. Birthdays encourage the young to get on with living and warn the old that they will soon get on with dying.

They also give life a starting point. I was born on November 2, 1982, sometime in the morning, delivered through a caesarian section to Georges Robert LaRoche and Lois Robillard LaRoche at a hospital that no longer exists. As far as I can figure these things out, I was most certainly conceived in Houston, Texas. I was later baptised in the Notre Dame de Grace borough of Montreal. I was heavy baby, over 10 pounds. I had blonde hair. I listened to Bob Dylan in the womb. That's my start.

Birthdays help fill in details. If we count period of a month or more, I've lived in three houses, one apartment, one university residence, and one basement of a relative. I've accumulated two degrees, run a student newspaper, worked about a dozen different jobs, and travelled to four different continents, if I include my own. I can play three instruments to a reasonable degree. And I think I'm getting somewhere.

But what matters most, and what Birthdays point out, is that I have a roof over my head, a loving family, and great friends and colleagues, including you, the person reading this post. I am extremely fortunate. If I were dying of cancer, I would still be fortunate. In life, as in death, a human being cannot ask for much more than what I've already listed.

Life is good, grand, and happy -- and even though I'm only a day older today than I was yesterday, I'm glad an artifical construct of a day has reminded me.

谢谢。