Birthday Loot

Even if you don't expect anything on your birthday, surprises and even gifts have a habit of making appearances. Birthdays are a time when you must remember your manners and be prolific with your thank yous. Mostly you are grateful for the connections that link you to those special people in your life. From family to friends it is always better to hear from them on happy occasions and turning one year older has to be considered one of those. As your birthday begins to fade away but just before you begin dreaming of the next, you can't help but do a quick tally of those who checked in, and if you are really lucky your list will be sizeable. What you realize as your birthdays march by, is that the parade bandstand is not always as filled as it has been on birthdays past. You cannot feasibly maintain all the ties that used to bind so birthdays are sometimes also about letting go. You may get an innocuous card without a signature from an old friend who chose email over snailmail or a phonecall, and for the first time in eons you may not hear from that friend you grew up with, whose birthdays you never forget. This does not mean that you feel any real sense of loss because what you have is really as good as it gets. Every birthday is a people filter of sorts so despite the few that fall away there are so many more that remain and they are your constants, the truly steadfast forces in your life, the greatest gifts of all and you are ever thankful for them.