Let’s take a closer look at what we call celebrations.

I’ll start at the beginning. We celebrate our birth dates. The truth is none of us can remember the day or the hour our mothers brought us into this world. We’re getting presents and eating cake because we were told this day or that day is the one when we were born.

Sometime in my early life, my mother must have said to me, “You were born on June 15,” and so I grew up believing that was the day I’m supposed to celebrate each year. One day as a kid while I was exploring in our attic, I came across a gray metal box and when I opened it, I saw that the box was where Mom kept important papers. As I shuffled through them, I found a newspaper announcement about my birth and as I read down, I took a gasp of breath. The newspaper said I was born on June 14. I hurried downstairs and immediately confronted my mom.

“Oh, that’s just a misprint,” she said. “You were born on the 15th. Check your birth certificate.”

Until this very day, I wonder if she was telling me the truth or I’ve been celebrating on the wrong day for my entire life.

Birthdays are fun of course until you get too old to want to see another one come along. The excitement I felt as a kid when I looked forward to my annual yahoo has changed into resignation ever since I reached 30, then, 40, then 50, then 60 and beyond. If you’re like me, you want to pull back the calendar pages and stop getting to our birthdays so darn fast.

I have an image frozen in my mind of a day when my mother was wheeled into her nursing home dining room to a birthday party for a 98-year-old woman. As I looked around the room, I saw none of the residents smiling under their silly birthday cone hats the nurses had put on them. The woman herself never raised her head during the Happy Birthday song the nurses sang to her and she had to be spoon fed her piece of cake. So sad, I thought. I came to realize that parties for old people are events for younger families and friends to enjoy and not so much for the guest of honor. That day at the nursing home, no family or friends attended.

Hey, birthdays do have one significance. We’ve stayed alive for another year and that’s better than the alternative. If I make it to next year, maybe I’ll double up and celebrate June 14 and June 15 because I don’t know how many birthdays I have left at this age of my life.

Another celebration that has little or no merit is a wedding. Two people promise to love each other forever and we know how that often goes. A dad drops thousands and thousands of dollars on his daughter’s first wedding to celebrate and to be honest and crude here, to celebrate - nothing. The bride and groom has achieved nothing yet and are walking down a road filled with potholes of mysteries, problems, and issues that will threaten the very existence of their relationship. That’s why we should celebrate their anniversary instead. If this couple makes it to the yearly date of their vows and if they still are in love and going strong, then strike up the band, save dad the big bucks, and have a joyfully good time dancing to their accomplishments.

Let’s look at a few other days of celebration which most of us do not participate with in any meaningful way. On Columbus Day, the kids are off from school. Even if we did honor this man who has been proven to never have discovered America and the question of his bad character has been historically raised recently, what exactly should we do? Put models of the Nina, the Pinta, and Santa Maria on our dinner tables?

In the winter, we get a national holiday for Martin Luther King’s birthday. He was a man of peace who died from the bullet of an assassin. I still love to watch a recording of his civil rights speech in Washington, but how many of us even know or care about who he was just as long as we get a long weekend in late January.

Presidents’ birthdays are days off from school, too. Lots of shopping sales to honor George and Abe. I’m sure they would feel honored about that. Memorial Day we pay tribute to our veterans and those who have died in wars and the Fourth of July offers us parades and fireworks, but for most of us, they become reasons for cookouts with hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. All in all, that’s a good thing.

Is there anything that every one of us has reason to celebrate? I believe there is.

So, let’s take in this hour, this day, the rest of our lifetimes and celebrate the privilege of having been given this life for as long as we have it to live.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.