Birthday Boy

“How much does a person change from year to year?” Malcolm wondered. He was 57 today. Was he a different man from the man he’d been at, say, 23? He knew that all his cells were different; he “was what he ate,” and all that. He probably wasn’t hauling around any of the same molecules he’d been born with. And he couldn’t say his thoughts were the same. When he was born, he had no thoughts. Then somehow, thoughts came along, probably with the words he learned. The more words he learned, the larger and more complicated his thoughts had become until it seemed as if they had collapsed of their own weight around the time he turned 13. At that age, he’d stopped thinking for several years in favor of sensations and actions. Then it was back to thinking, but directed through various educational channels.

How much was the content of his thoughts determined by others? He could honestly say that right now, it didn’t matter. He was paid to think, to solve certain problems. The nature of the problems had changed over the years, but it was like exercise. He’d built up his thought muscles, probably in an unbalanced way, but he wasn’t worried about getting stuck. He had always counted on the phenomenon that as soon as he left the work environment, even for a weekend, his thoughts started doing other types of exercises, more fun exercises. But this did not answer the question.

To get an idea about how much a person changes from year to year he would have to figure out: What is a person, anyway? And that was related to the ages-old query: Who am I? which Malcolm had (for a long time, anyway) thought to be very silly. Until today, his 57th birthday! So, that was one thing that had changed: he was now willing to entertain that formerly silly question, maybe even start a search. He realized there was philosophical quicksand out there in the form of Eastern religious notions that proposed the idea of No Self. He wanted to avoid that quicksand, so he began with his environment.

Did his personality expand to fill the space allotted? The space allotted was considerable, since he’d been divorced for eight years now. He had a grown daughter; she made no demands on him, only suggestions. He kept a Cumberland Slider turtle in a large terrarium that had its own filtered pond. He’d had Shelly since the divorce, and the creature was now nine inches long excluding his tail. Shelly was a good listener, and not much trouble. The condominium manager, a woman about his age, looked after Shelly when Malcolm went on short business trips (the only kind he’d agreed to). Did having a turtle make him a certain kind of person? Did it expand his identity or keep it from expanding? Was bigger better when it came to identity?

Malcolm saw that this new mental exercise he’d given himself for his 57th birthday might become complicated and heavy, as his thoughts around ages 11 and 12 had been. In fact, he may have gone over the same philosophical territory back then. Surely the fact that he was now living alone, supporting himself in a style he liked, made these thoughts new, since they sprang from a different situation, dependent vs. independent. But maybe there was a thread of self that went all the way through the years? If that were so, he wanted evidence, and he would find it. He raised his store-bought frozen orange creamsicle into the air in a salute. "Happy Birthday, Self!"

— Macoff