By Shaun Tumpane
Laguna Woods Globe columnist
It doesn’t seem all that long ago when we were impatient with time, when parents started the annual ritual of the birthday countdown.
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“Hey, little Shaunie, only 10 days until you turn 6!”
Or the Christmas countdown, with or without the Advent calendar.
From the moment we learn to count, keeping track of time was and still is always in the forefront of our minds.
You turn 10, you’re told, “Hey, you are a double digit’r now!” When you’re 12, you can’t wait to be a teenager.
If you’re a senior and your girlfriend is a sophomore, you have a gold star on your calendar on her birthday – her 18th birthday, that is, which is a couple of years away. Your 21st birthday is a milestone, as you now may legally indulge in adult beverages.
Yeah, and talk about a puzzlement, when you turned 18 you could vote, and if you were born during the Truman administration, you could get drafted and shot at, but no guzzling gin for another three years.
The years spent pining for the sands of time to sift more quickly to the bottom of the hourglass fade from your frontal lobe, and for a decade or three, the thrill of a birthday on the horizon was still exciting, but not the way it was when you were 9 and wishing for a new bike.
After marriage, birthdays usually come with a once-a-year treat. I mean, what do you get a balding 47-year-old with a seemingly ever-increasing paunch?
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Women love birthdays, as most of their female parental units explained that birthdays of wives and moms are “Queen for a Day” days. Breakfast in bed, children giving countless hugs to Mommy, gifts wrapped with love, and Dad’s promise to keep his distance after the kids go to bed – her once-a-year treat.
That promise is reminiscent of the answer to the question, “Why does the bride have such a big smile on her face walking out of the church after her nuptials?”
Yes, the preoccupation with time never dissipates over the course of one’s life; however, instead of yearning for time to speed up, when you become that wonderful moniker “senior citizen,” you constantly marvel how much faster time passes now relative to when you were six days short of your 8th birthday.
Once one realizes that he/she is closer to the end than the beginning, the wise though wizened among us brush up on their Latin and carpe diem.
Would we behave differently if we knew which day would be our last? Maybe. But, in our iron pyrite years, we do perfect doing nothing at our own pace.
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Shaun Tumpane is a Laguna Woods Village resident.