Coming to terms with my birthday

I am approaching my birthday.
This has never been easy for me.
That sounds strange, I know. Who doesn't look forward to birthdays? It's the one day of the year that's yours, that celebrates the entering into this world of you! And even though there are thousands - if not millions - of people who share that birth date, it's still yours. Family and friends gather and sing to you, tell you how happy they are for you, and give you presents with no expectation of anything in return (at least not immediately).
But I've never been big on birthdays. I've always felt a little self-conscious about them.
Still, I've had some great ones.
My 13th birthday is one of the earliest I'll always remember, for two gifts: a Bible and a Football.
If you think that's an odd combination, you're not from the South. You've heard the old saying, "Football is religion." As I said many years ago and probably heard it from somebody else, "You know religion is important in the South because it's so often compared to football."
Of course, it wasn't just any football. It was "The Duke,'' the official NFL football (they were called "The Duke'' back then; it even had that stamped on the side). They were not inexpensive, and I knew it was an outrageously expensive birthday gift from my mother and father.
But equally as important to me was my first leather-bound Scofield Bible, New King James version. This was a "reference" Bible, with footnotes and references. For the first time, I was able to read a passage and immediately find cross-references - other passages in other parts of the Bible that spoke to the same issue or comparative passage. I have always loved research. I remember it took me something like five years to go through the book of Galatians, looking up every annotation and cross-reference for every chapter, verse, word.
And my name was inscribed in gold lettering on the cover. How cool was that?
You have to skip way ahead to get to the next birthday that stands out. The Trophy Wife, even before she was the Trophy Wife, once got us third row, center stage seats for a Sting concert. That was huge.
A decade later, after she had become The Trophy Wife, she surprised me again by not only having a whole bunch of my friends over to the house on a Saturday afternoon before an Alabama-Tennessee game, but had arranged for a birthday cake to be presented to me in the press box at Legion Field that night, to share with all the media covering that game.
Oh, and there was the week before my 16th birthday. Obviously, turning 16 was huge because I got my drivers' license. But what made that birthday particularly memorable is that my friend Lee turned 16 four days before me, and I refused to acknowledge her existence for those four days - which wasn't easy to do, considering our small group of friends that seemed to do things together every day, and the fact that every day she tried to remind me that she could drive legally by herself and I could not.
I'm not even sure how I came to decide to not acknowledge the superiority that having a drivers' license gave her over me for less than a week. It just seemed like the thing to do.
(On the other hand, it's been fun on every subsequent milestone birthday to make sure Lee heard from me for those four days that I remained "significantly'' younger than her. It's a wonder we're still friends at all.)
I've tried to come to grips with growing older. I know it's natural, and I know the alternative. I'm very aware of how my body has changed with age - weight gain that I used to never think about; eyes that used to be better than 20-20 but now are borderline in need of glasses (and certainly need reading glasses); the constant hissss echoing in my ears, a sign that my hearing is no longer as sharp, not to mention the certain pitches I no longer hear. And I look in the mirror and see not my father, but my grandfather, that farmer/lumberman/country-boy from the hills of very rural Georgia.
Now, I really am depressed
But it's OK.
I think.
I am a long way from being satisfied with who or what I am. Even at this advanced age, it feels like I'm still just getting started on the process. But I have finally ruled a few things out:
I won't be a major league relief pitcher, an NFL quarterback, a power forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, or compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
I won't be performing jazz in a smokey club or be a country music recording artist (well, maybe I haven't quite given up on that last one).
I won't write a great world-changing novel, or produce an award-winning movie, or be the trusted advisor to a world leader (I never wanted to be the world leader, just his trusted advisor).
But I have had a taste of all of those, just close enough to get a sense of what it feels like.
I now have a much better understanding of how much I don't know. At the same time, I have a better grasp of what I do know. I still get caught up in things that ultimately don't matter, but I also realize they don't matter even as I'm caught up in them.
There is a sense of security in who I am and what I can and what I can't do that it has taken me a long time to get to. I lived most of my life believing that I should be able to do anything, trying to either fake what I couldn't do (if not out-right hide it) and dealing with resentment against those people who could do those things because it made me feel they were somehow better than me.
And recognizing that some people simply are better than me -- a lot of them, in fact. And that's OK.
In fact, it depresses me to think of how much more I could have accomplished if I had simply recognized my own limitations a long time ago and humbled myself enough to let other people do what they do and get us all to work together to make us all more successful.
But this isn't about being depressed.
Because I'm not. I have a great wife who loves me through all my mood swings, my paranoia and hypochondria and insecurities (although she still doesn't like it when I bring over Gadsden Jevic, my life-long shadow whose company - unfortunately - I still enjoy!).
I have great kids who, through a miracle of God and their mother's wisdom, actually seem poised to do what I always dreamed they would do:  have a positive impact on the world based on their active relationship with God.
And I have great extended family and friends and dog (it's amazing how when you feel nobody loves you, your dog always does).
So Happy Birthday to me.
Don't feel compelled to mention it to me, however.
But a good book - now that I'm too old to play football - is always appreciated.
Besides, I don't expect to be going anywhere. There's still so much more to learn.