It's My Birthday Quote, Unquote...

April 11 brings my 56th birthday

Which could be a cause for dismay

Although the candles increase

The wonders never cease

As long as I remember to play

When you're young, birthdays are a good excuse to invite friends over to play... has pin the tail on the donkey ever been played outside a birthday party? My favorite parties when I was young usually involved rounding everyone up for a baseball game - I asked my dad if I could burn off one of our two acres to build a baseball field in March 0f 1963 and celebrated with a true sandlot game and, as a result, that field was the site of hundreds of games over the next 2 decades. In college, I was kidnapped with a pillow over my head, put in a car and delivered to homeplate outside of our freshman dorm for an impromptu game with friends. I tried to organize a game for my 30th birthday, but Portland weather isn't as amenable to mid-April basking as Stanford's is.

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(A nice postscipt to the day came with Albert Puljos hitting a grand slam and a 3 run HR as the Cards beat Houston 11-2 and at least for a day are in first place!)

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These days, my celebrations aren't as active though nice weather will lure me out for a round of golf, but today's forecast is mixed. As a result, I'm inside posting. I've decided for this entry to collect some of the more approriate quotes regarding birthdays and also include a nice poem that Deborah wrote for me - my transcedentalist high school English teacher, Edna Stewart would have approved...

PONDERING THE PONDERER

Methinks time spent in soft repose
Is oft mistook for idle doze.
But here we’d have some hard debate
Does one daydream or cogitate?

Reflection on the past to date
May be to some, to ruminate
While others find their thoughts best spent
Toward future plans of high assent.

But neither here nor there, not up nor down
Is where ideals and dreams must crown.
For thoughts, like roads, are seldom drawn
Intending they not be traveled on.

In any trek detours are found
Amid deep thoughts our dreams abound.
So now and then, one supposes
we must stop and think of roses.
-- Deborah Huxley
April 2009

I’m 56 years old. That’s 13.33 Celsius

Of late I appear

To have reached that stage

When people who look old

Who are only my age.

- Richard Armour

My birthday!--what a different sound

That word had in my youthful ears;

And how each time the day comes round,

Less and less white its mark appears.

- Thomas Moore

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.- T.S. Eliot

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.- Muhammad Ali

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
-Groucho Marx

“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.”
George Harrison

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
-Mark Twain


Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.
-Bob Hope


Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.


Happy birthday, you’re not getting old,

Stay in the game, it’s not time to fold.

Wrinkles and grey hair, are just a new look,

Countless experiences, you should write in a book.

A birthday is seldom, a serious occasion,

Try not to take it, like the D-day invasion.

Laughter and jokes are within sight,

Stock up on both, all through the night.


The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left but as you get older, it turns back to the right….


I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now.

If we could be twice young and twice old we could correct all our mistakes.

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair