As has been the case for the past 25-years, my July 17th birthday conveniently occurred one day after my sons July 16th birthday. Every single year the 17th of July miraculously follows the 16th…numbers are so mystical.

This year my wife, one of those odd people that understands the seemingly indecipherable language that numbers speak, informed me that Jackson and I were having palindrome birthdays this year. A palindrome, as the trusty dictionary explains, is “a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forward.” Wow!

As the internet is prone to do, it provided me with a laundry list of examples, some interesting…some odd:

  • Civic
  • Mom
  • Peep
  • Ma is a nun, as I am.
  • We panic in a pew.
  • Yo, Banana Boy!
  • Step on no pets.

So, until July 16th of next year, “2552” will be Jackson and my personal numerical palindrome for the ages…our ages anyway. Since I am so fond of this palindrome concept, and have so enjoyed squeezing the word “palindrome” into quasi-polite conversation, I have decided that after my birthday next year, I am going to willingly pause my birthdays until the boy turns 35. I tried to use math to figure out if Jackson and I had anymore palindrome years in our future, but seeing how math always…always…always…refuses to cooperate with me, I decided that this birthday pause was a simpler solution.

Simpler, and best for all involved. Specifically, me. I just need a short break from all this getting old stuff. For the past several years I have lovingly mocked my wife for her need to rely upon reading glasses to perform such tasks as…well…reading. Before these eye-crutches became a ubiquitous fixture upon her lovely face, in a fit of frustration, she would hand me something and dejectedly ask, “What’s this say?”

I, feeling like a balding Superman in tattered tights, with a casual glance, would effortlessly translate the blurred images she was trying to decipher. All while deftly opening the jar of Miracle Whip that was thwarting her attempt at a proper BLT. Actually, a “proper BLT” would be lightly slathered with Hellman’s Mayonnaise, but as a mixed mayo marriage, we have learned to accept one another’s poor taste in condiments and have made space for both in the refrigerator.

Sometime in the past year, either my arms got too short, or my vision got too long. I can still twist the top off of Miracle Whip jars when duty calls, but my casual deciphering glance has become labored, squinty…not very super.

For so long I assumed, with great hubris, that my vision was different, that my eyes were special. I imagined traipsing over the hill towards the golden years below, smugly waving off the assistance of eye-crutches as I pompously recited the labels of pill bottles to the hordes of blurry-eyed mortals that shuffled the halls of my wing of the nursing home…the one my children promised not to put me in.

We only have access to knowing whatever it is we know at any given time. Now, at the backside of a 2552 palindrome, time has passed, and I know different. So it goes.

The backside. Some of it stinks.