Just Another Tuesday: Sunday musings…1/12/25
“How was your Birthday, Dr. White?”
It’s amazing how, where, and why so many epiphanies arrive. Honestly, I’m not sure why this surprises me. I really haven’t had all that many of what could or should really be called epiphanies, but the few that I have had have all kinda snuck up on me out of the blue mist of the mundane. For example, while playing golf with my Dad the week after 9/11 I was stopped in my tracks when a very simple, altogether reasonable question–do you want to play the Ocean Course again–delivered to me a two part gem. The stuff that makes me unhappy brings me down lower than the stuff that makes me happy picks me up. You can’t necessarily make the happy stuff happy all the time, but you can surely make an effort to avoid at least SOME of the unhappy stuff once it’s been identified.
I hated the Ocean Course; no, thank you, I’d rather not play it again.
And so it was that I found myself answering all kinds of folks who were genuinely interested in how my 65th birthday went. What did I do to mark the occasion? Did I enjoy the day? How was I feeling about 65? Normal questions asked in good faith by decent folks. I spent a goodly part of each day answering each person with some version of “good” or “great” or “you know, it’s just a number after all”, and “that’s very kind” when they expressed disbelief at the number in question. It was nice, actually, to receive those tiny gifts of interest from so many people, most of whom live lives that only intersect with the professional and not the personal version of who I might be at any given point.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become a bit kinder to myself, especially when it comes to time. It’s a cliche, of course, but time is really the most valuable thing no one has enough of. A very nice benefit of being my own boss is the ability to give myself the gift of time during my birthday week even though I was returning from a lengthy Holiday break. Some of that time was quite productive (I reviewed a very complex case as an expert witness), some of it was put to practical use (I’m rebuilding the fitness habits that fell apart along with my hips), but the real gift was the luxury of indulging in tiny little pleasures, like my love for finales.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find “lasts” so fascinating? Beth is endlessly tickled by how hard I will work to watch the last episode of a television series I barely followed, or read the final entry of a long-running serial or book series. I think it started with the finale of M*A*S*H. The most recent favorite has to be Ted Lasso. Did you ever read that series about the female detective, maybe she was a doctor, where each book was titled with a letter? You know, “C Is For Whatever”, and so on? When the author got to “Y” I was literally going to read “A” so that I could read “Z” so that I could then see how she closed out her epic trip through the alphabet. I swear that I was as saddened by the author’s passing before she started “Z” as any devoted reader who’d made it from “A to Y”.
All of which is a build-up to the gift of watching the recording that I made of Hoda Kotb’s final 3 hours as co-host of NBC’s Today show. We are Today Show watchers, Beth and I. Hoda’s story is a good one. She seems to be a genuinely nice person, someone who truly likes, nay loves, most of the folks around her. Someone who is grateful for the life she gets to live. Unlike so many famous TV personalities she was leaving the show on her own terms for reasons that I can personally understand and support: she wished to be home with and for her two grade-school daughters as they grew up.
And then, there it was. Pretty much the last guest was a country music star, a guy named Walker Hays. Now, I am not the country music guy in the family, although everyone will likely agree that I’ve become at least conversant with the genre as it has become more “pop” in recent years. Still, I needed to Google Hays to “remember” that his big hit is “We Fancy”, or something like that. But here he was, strumming a guitar as he entered stage left, singing a song that he and Hoda had written together called “Wednesday”* and bringing with him my epiphany: Most days are just Wednesdays. A truly happy life is one where you are grateful, truly grateful, for the Wednesdays.
“Some days are the best days. Some days are ‘she said yes’ days. Some days are ‘it’s a girl, good Lord how in the world did I get blessed’ days. Some days are the worst days, on the taillights of a hearse days.
Most days are just Wednesdays. Get up and do the same old same again’s days.
If tomorrow ain’t nothing new, I’m just glad I get to do, just another Wednesday with you.”
Seriously, how good is that?! I went through half a box of tissues, me and everyone in that studio audience just yanking ’em out of the box, watching and listening as my big old epiphany landed. Most days are just days. Events, happenings, milestones might be what we remember, might be how we track our stories, but it’s all of those plain old every days that make up a life. Finding the joys of those every days, and more importantly being grateful for the micro joys that make up those days, is the key to happiness.
“What did you do on your birthday?” I went to work. It was a Tuesday and so I went to the operating room, and then I did a bunch of lasers, and after that saw a bunch of folks in the clinic. I got to help some really nice people be healthy. I spent the night with my Better 95%. We had dinner at home. Chicken. Not a birthday dinner but a recipe we have maybe once a week. Had a glass of “Tuesday Wine”. Watched a TV show we’ve been enjoying. It was just another Tuesday, nothing new, in a place that makes me happy and with the person I love more than anyone or anything, like so many Tuesdays I’ve been lucky to have over so many years.
Thank you for the Birthday wishes. It was just another Tuesday. It doesn’t get any better than that.
I’ll see you next week…
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