Daily Prompt

47

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is a day unlike the other 364 days (and every four years, 365 days), as today is the 47th anniversary of an important day in my life. Perhaps the only important day in my life. On this date 47 years ago, it became possible for me to do, well, everything, which is not the same as everything well. I became a human being at 6:37 p.m. (just in time for dinner) on November 18, 1968. Thank you, mom.

Age is a statistic, and mine are these (for your own numbers, feel free to play with the age calculator that I linked to): As of today, I have been here for 17,167 days (counting today), which is also more than 412,000 hours and approximately 370,801,080 breaths, and 1,779,845,184 heart beats since I was born.
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Auden & Bluffing

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the documentary, “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” W.H. Auden’s friend Thekla Clark recounts the story of one of Auden’s lovers complaining to him that he thought Auden would be more “romantic,” being a poet, after all. “But you aren’t romantic,” Clark quotes the lover telling the poet. “You aren’t romantic at all.”

“If you want romance,” Clark quotes Auden replying, “screw a journalist.” (Except the word used is not “screw.”)

Auden was not one to ruin a good line—or a good night—by spending it an explanation of the difference between the romantic and the sentimental.
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Not-So Secret Admirer

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(It is a gray, rainy November day here in upstate New York. It is raining gray. To the beach we go …)

The Atlantic Ocean. Those tiny dots in the photo above are people with lives, voices, loved ones, losses. Sunburns.

We are standing in front of the “Beach Hut” at Smith Point County Park on the South Shore of Long Island. It is 2014, one of the more recent years in history. For much of my adult life, I have sat here internally convinced that I do not like “the beach.” I do not remember when I convinced myself of this. I do not remember an unpleasant beach incident that convinced me of this piece of self-knowledge.
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