Most of the time, I do not feel 43.  34 maybe.  17 sometimes.  12, too.  But far less often 43.

People who are younger than I am, often by a fair number of years, I still think of as my elders.  Nearly all professional athletes, for instance.  Why is that?

Today is my birthday, which may make it a day for sober reflection, as if every day isn’t already such a day.  One day closer death, one day closer to my last basketball game, one day closer to retirement, one day closer to the bike crash I surely will one day have–because I don’t intend any time soon to quit biking, and if you bike long enough, you will fall off sometime–and so on.

In my 43rd year I’d like to eat more vegetables, especially those grown in my own garden.  I’d like write more worthwhile blog posts, or at least funnier ones.  I’d like to revisit Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play an afternoon game.  I’d like spend more summer evenings strumming my uke by the campfire.  I’d like to join a Sunday School class again (why, five years ago, did we move from a church that gave up on adult Sunday School to one that had given up on adult Sunday School?).  I’d like like to dunk a basketball one more time–but I’m not holding my breath on that one.

 I’m looking forward to it.

• I turn 42 today.
• Jackie Robinson wore #42.
• One time in a summer league basketball game in Bourbon, I scored 42 points.
• 42 days into 2012, I will have written 42 new blog entries.
• My world literature class will meet 42 times this semester--41 classes and a final exam period.
• Volume 42 of the Great Books of the Western World includes the major works of Immanuel Kant. I've never read it.  I don't plan on wasting my 42nd year doing so.
• Psalm 42 begins, "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God."
• 42 feet is a perfect distince between home plate and the pitchng rubber in wiffle ball.
• "Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point--Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather in Christ the Judge." (p. 42, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel of lost innocence you should go to the library right now and get).
• Say "Tea for two" really fast about 10 times and I bet you'll almost say 42.
• I've always found Matthew 5:42--"Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you"--harder to follow than I would like to admit.
• 6 x 7.  Also 41 + 1.
• 24--the number I wore in basketball most of the time--backwards is 42.
•  A Double Quarter Pounder from McDonald's contains 42 grams of fat.
• If gained 42 pounds--perhaps by eating 42 Double Quarter Pounders a week for the next 42 days (6 weeks)--I would weigh 225 pounds.
• I just did 42 push-ups, so I could say that I just did 42 push-ups.
• Apparantly this guy http://youtu.be/tRe1wFIACw8 has a 42 inch vertical.  He definitely has a really cool Alfalfa hair thing going.
• I would bet 42 dollars that fewer than 42 people will actually read this blog entry.