Half a Thought About Half a Century

Larry recently wrote about plans for a 60th birthday bash; while the next anniversary of my arrival on earth will merely be number 50, and although the question of whether to invite Green Day (or whomever) to perform at the event doesn’t figure in for me, I have, somewhat in spite of myself, begun to think about what I should do to mark the date or even, predictably, if it should even be marked at all.

The two ideas I’ve been knocking about are an event and an image.

The former would be a fifty mile bike ride—a half-century—that would visit spots that have been meaningful to me in and around Seattle. I’ve thought that I would like to pull half (in keeping with the demi-theme) a keg of beer around on the trailer and serve it up to whomever en route.

The image is simply this: I see myself arriving home, on my bike, accompanied by a parade of fellow cyclists, welcomed by a cheering throng of my loved ones.

Is that too much to ask, really?

Ideally, of course, I ought to commemorate the day through service to others. We have a neighbor who planted 40 trees on her 40th birthday. Maybe I could fix 50 flat bicycle tires or something like that.

It all comes back to this question that Richard and I want to explore in Hunting the Invisible Game. How do we plan a day to simultaneously save and savor the world?

One of my models for a day in which my own joy was made manifest by manifesting joy for others was the Patchkit Alleycat. Even though everything I did was for the sake of participants, it all gave me the deepest possible satisfaction. If only the entire experience could have provided a service to the larger community it would have been perfect.

I’m not yet saying my birthday party should be a fundraiser for say, Bikeworks, but maybe.