Note: I started this back when it was actually my birthday, back in April, and never sent it. Oops. So here goes, just a few months late.

I turned 43 this week. It’s not really a milestone year, as far as I’m aware. Next year is apparently when things start to go haywire, so I have another year of relative health. Guess it’s time to get into ultramarathons.

Typically I don’t care to celebrate my birthday. The day always finds me feeling kind of glum, and often involves me sitting in a quiet room listening to Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity on repeat. I still listened to Clarity this year, because it’s a wonderful, perfect record and deserves listening to. But the usual melancholy wasn’t really there this year.

My corporate overlords give each of us an extra day of PTO to be used in the rough vicinity of our birthdays. I opted to take mine on the day since we had the lad’s first parent-teacher conference that day, and the school was off the rest of the day, so that way I could spend the day hanging out with him afterward.

Von got me this amazing, handmade 3-dimensional portrait of Walter, which had me all kinds of emotional. I saw it and immediately welled up. They really captured his face and pose, it’s remarkable. I love it so much.

From there, it was just me and the little guy. We went for a walk down to the coffee shop, about a third of a mile away, and he walked most of the way there on his own. We spent some time just sitting outside the shop, enjoying a scone and some drinks, and the beautiful weather. A little while later, we trekked down to the Royal Blue for some lunch. I’d been itching to go since it replaced the old Gallery One, and I thoroughly enjoyed the smash burger.

After a quiet afternoon, I went down to Pigtown for the A Tribe Called Run x Pigtown Brew Runners’ Four-Run-Oh day celebration and run. For those unaware, 410 is Baltimore’s biggest area code, and thus on April 10th the city celebrates itself in various ways. The O’s had a whole bunch of stuff going on at the game that night, which I learned because our route had us circling Camden Yards twice as the game began. The throngs of O’s fans we were darting between were surprisingly good-humored about the whole thing.

Back to the point. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly, I don’t love to celebrate my birthday. Sure, getting older is what it is, but I don’t think it’s that. I’m generally uncomfortable with a lot of attention, which certainly is part of it. There’s some lingering self doubt that anyone would really care to do anything. Various failed birthday plans loom large in my memory, so, the logic goes, it’s better not to try.

But I always feel inner pressure to do something, or want to do something. Everyone else does! Why not me? And so the lead up to the day fills me with increasing dread and anxiety. Like my birthday is going to be disappointing for the people around me.

Maybe I let myself off the hook this year. Maybe I found something I wanted to do: enjoy a nice spring day with my son. I don’t know how much being a dad changed the calculus for me, but at least this time, it gave me some relief from my own anxieties and demons.

I guess that was my brain’s present to itself. Happy birthday to me.