Happy Birthday Nick!

At the end of chapter seven of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway remembers that it is his birthday.

"I just remembered, today's my birthday."

As a sidebar. As a by-the-way. As a tweet to nobody. To reinforce the lack of audience, it is only Tom who responds with a mechanical "Happy birthday" while nursing a whisky at the bar.

Well, as coincidence would have it, we are currently studying chapter seven of The Great Gatsby, and today is my birthday.

Huh. "I just remembered. Today's my birthday." Thirty-five for me. That's five years Nick's elder. When I first started teaching Gatsby, I looked up to Nick as a voice of experience. Because he had years on me. But no more.

I am now older than Nick. As well as Biff and Happy Loman. I am now over a decade older than Beowulf must have been when he enters Heorot Hall to defeat Grendel. I am older than Hamlet and all of Lear's daughters. I'm old enough to be Holden's father. To offer marital advice to John Proctor. To grieve with George about Lennie and to scold Bernard Marx about John. To stand shoulder to shoulder with Reverend Dimmesdale and to run away from Anton Chigurh.

I don't know what any of this means. Except to suggest that this is another cool thing about reading: the constancy of books.

No man, no. I get older. They stay the same age. Yes they do.

Or, stated more poetically, "can I handle the seasons of my life?" I believe I can, with characters standing firmly before, alongside, and behind me.