Community Corner

Geoff Gilbert's Blog: Let Them Eat Cake

 Good morning and greetings, celebration fans. Well, it’s December and according to my Kim Kardashian desktop calendar, another birthday has come and gone. Scientific studies have proven that people who have more birthdays tend to live longer. To quote actor Bill Murray, ” So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.”

I believe it was either Alex Trabek or Abraham Lincoln who said, “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” After another year of blowing out candles, I am well aware that as senior citizen, I am not getting younger. The painter Pablo Picasso once remarked ” It takes a long time to grow young.” The way I see it, I’m not quite over the hill but I’ve got a great view.

I know the number 61 one is just a number, but I prefer to associate it with Roger Maris’ home run record, not the age on my driver’s license. Lucille Ball had the right idea when she said “The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age.” I don’t want to say I’m getting old but the other day I went to an antique auction and three people bid on me.

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So on 12/12/12 of last year, I celebrated my 60th birthday. There was a lot of pressure on me to do it up right, so I rounded up the old gang and we watched the Golden State Warriors defeat the Miami Heat on a last second shot by Draymond Green. It was very similar to my bar mitzvah party, as there were no girls, plenty of appetizers and a 10 p.m. curfew.

So this year the pressure was off, as I could just sit back and enjoy hearing from old friends and cell mates. I savored the day for what is was, or as George Harrison once tweeted, “All the world is a birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much.” And have all the ice cream you want. Socialite Paris Hilton once remarked, “The way I see it, you should live everyday like it’s your birthday.” And as the Internet has revealed, she looks very good in her birthday suit.

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They say that age is just a number. Baseball star Satchel Page once asked “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?"

Well, I wouldn’t be thinking 61. I wouldn’t mind switching those numbers around to the sweet 16. I believe it was Chinese scholar Yung No More who said age doesn’t matter, unless you’re a piece of muenster cheese. Although it seems the older I get, the fewer things seem waiting in line for.

Still, it’s a vicious cycle, or as astronaut John Glenn observed, “There is no cure for the common birthday.” Some feel that celebrating your birthday is like being happy that you are closer to your grave.

Or as comedian Jerry Seinfeld once commented, “Birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we’ve grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it’s not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably, happy birthday? No such thing.”

But let’s end this subject on a happier note. Here are three jokes for your amusement.

A family had twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other thought it was too cold. If one said the TV was too loud, the other claimed the volume needed to be turned up. Opposite in every way, one was an eternal optimist, the other a doom and gloom pessimist.

Just to see what would happen, on the twins’ birthday their father loaded the pessimist’s room with every imaginable toy and game. The optimist’s room he loaded with horse manure. That night the father passed by the pessimist’s room and found him sitting amid his new gifts crying bitterly. ‘Why are you crying?’ the father asked.

‘Because my friends will be jealous, I’ll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I’ll constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually get broken.’ Passing the optimist twin’s room, the father found him dancing for joy in the pile of manure. ‘What are you so happy about?’ he asked. To which his optimist twin replied, ‘There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!’

A traveling salesman was passing through a small town in Texas when he sees a little old man sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a house. So he stops and says to him, “You look as if you don’t have a care in the world! What’s your formula for a long and happy life?”

And the little old man says, “Well, I smoke six packs of cigarettes a day, I drink a quart of bourbon every four hours and six cases of beer a week. I never wash and I go out every night; I don’t get to bed until four in the morning.” And the guy says, “Wow, that’s just great. How old are you?”

And the little man says, “Twenty-two.”

Every morning a man passes a house in his street and every morning he sees a woman in her front garden beating her husband over the head with a French loaf. This goes on for months until one morning he passes the house and sees the woman is beating her husband with a chocolate éclair. Later that day he meets the woman in the street. ‘Aren’t you the woman who beats her husband with a French loaf?’ asks the man. ‘Only, today, I could have sworn you were hitting him with a big cake.’ ‘Oh, I was,’ replies the woman. ‘Today is his birthday.’

Today’s photo journey takes us back to the very chilly morning of December 6. I was sitting in my car along West Cliff waiting for some color to emerge in the clouds, but nothing happened until just before the sun made an appearance on the horizon. The action was occurring in a small area of the sky so I took out my zoom lens and captured red ribbons of cloud color. When the sun made its full appearance the moment was glorious, despite the fact that I had no feeling in my fingers.

Some things in life are worth a little frostbite for. This was one of them.

To check out the photos, click on http://www.SunriseSantaCruz.com/blog


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