Years ago, one of my many eccentricities was a love of randomly buying helium balloons, going to odd places, and releasing them. On some occasions, I would attach a message. (I have some interesting stories about some of these adventures, saved for a later misty October morning.) Mostly, though, I would simply watch in fascination as the laws of physics carried these orbs into the sky at varying speeds, against the seemingly infinite backdrop of ‘the great above.’ As childlike as finding delight in this might be, it is something that I still hold almost sacred all these decades later. Some of the allure undoubtedly is the unknown and mystery of how high and how far the balloons might reach, even as I become a pinpoint below it.

Today, Dawn and I went to buy one item at a discount store and instead walked out with $50 of miscellaneous treasures. The store had a vertical corral of whimsical balloons. I bought a minion-themed one. Even though Dawn kept guessing as to its purpose, I just kept offering ridiculous answers. Dawn is accustomed to my method, so she didn’t judo chop me across the neck as most people might have done.

We drove past the turnoff to our house and descended down the shaded and deep incline just outside the city limits of Springdale, where things get stranger looking as one traverses Friendship Road. Dawn wanted to know where we were going. Instead of answering her, I looped around and drove into the huge expanse named “Friendship Cemetery.” Dawn then speculated that my intent was to place the minion balloon as a surprise to some random grave. Granted, that is something I was certainly capable of, all the while imagining the reaction of whomever might drive up and see it.

We had the entire cemetery to ourselves, or so I thought, even though it was after 11:30 on a hot July Sunday morning. There was a slight Northerly breeze blowing and billowing underneath a spotty cover of clouds. Standing at the epicenter of this long cemetery, I imagined that it was as serene and peaceful setting that could be devised for such a day.

Dawn took my picture with the balloon as I bit off the streamer to add to its buoyancy. As I released the balloon, it rose against the backdrop of the bright summer sky. The silvery sheen of the balloon helped us to mark its trajectory as it made its solitary journey up and outward. Much to my surprise, even Dawn seemed to be enjoying the vision of the balloon, pirouetting and incrementally escaping our ability to discern its presence. To our mutual delight, we took turns laughing and noting how bad our eyesight seemed to be. After a few minutes, even the brilliance of the exterior of the balloon was defeated by the sheer distance it had conquered since I released it. I told Dawn a couple of my balloon stories from when I was younger and continuously prone toward antics of every variety.

It was a notable moment for me, having realized an accidental balloon provided such a delight to us.

As we drove around the back and turned to head back toward the entrance, something caught my eye and I said, “Look at that. There’s a bicycle in the middle of the road.” A mountain bike was parked facing us, plastic grocery sacks tied to the handlebars and blowing serenely with the wind. No one was in sight. The pastoral serenity of the huge vastness of the cemetery only strengthened the aura of unworldly effect. The bike was parked no more than 15 yards from we had initially stood out and released the balloon. I promise that it had not been there when we entered the cemetery or when I looked around as we watched the balloon rise. Dawn took a few pictures but unfortunately, none quite went wide enough to have captured the parked bike when we were enjoying ourselves.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I wondered where the rider was and how long he had been present. We looked around carefully as I inched up the path in the car. At that point, I was already even with the mountain bike, ghostly in its solitary stance. I spotted him first. A young gentleman was stretched out, curled up against a lower-profile headstone, feet facing North. I couldn’t see his face. Oddly, though, I could feel the manifest intimacy of his embrace with the tombstone. Only someone experiencing the unfathomable pain of loss would lie in the summer grass in such a place in such a way.

Dawn and I had inadvertently wandered into a very precious moment of pain in the mountain bike rider’s life. We hoped our display of fun and enthusiasm had not interfered with his very private expression of loss. It seemed as if the gentleman on the grass had been there forever, independent of our presence. I’m certain that his thoughts were swimming in the hereafter, so great was his memory of the person in the grave under his embrace.

I reluctantly drove away, fatally curious as to his story and to that of his loved one buried in a quiet grave in Friendship Cemetery. It must have been a worthy life and a formidable love. The researcher in me relishes the opportunity to discover the hidden story; the human in me dreads the plot of loss that I know underscores whatever I discover.

While I don’t know his story, I know that fate handed me a minion balloon for no other purpose than to cause me to wonder for many days as to whether all of us are creating moments in life that beg and beseech that someone will grieve our loss in such a way.

Meanwhile, the balloon which united us continues to soar away, oblivious to our thoughts, plans, and desires. It looks down on us all, shimmering. Please take a moment and look downward with it, imagining that your life will one bright summer morning be held in the same glorious way that the young man who journeyed on a bike to be with his loved one embraced his.

(From far enough away or high enough above, all that seems important to you will fade to fond remembrances and laughter. If you are lucky.)

After work, I stopped at Harp’s Grocery. The possible impending task of preparing food to shovel into my gullet seemed herculean and the promising lure of the storefront logo in the distance banished all thoughts of wasting my precious minutes cooking food.

I made my rounds through the supermarket, valiantly attempting to curtail my desire to place at least 1.2 of every delicious item into my proverbial shopping cart. The girl stocking produce undoubtedly considered reporting me to the manager as “suspicious,” given the rapacious way I was fondling all the foodstuffs with my eyeballs.

After exchanging pleasantries with the cashier, I left, digging out my car key from my right front pocket. My feet were on autopilot as I traversed the crosswalk; my thoughts were on eating all the things I had just purchased – and all at once, if duty required such a gastronomical sacrifice.

I pointed my electronic key fob toward the white late-model Hyundai to the right of the main store entrance. I clicked it again and didn’t notice the lights blink quickly. Naturally, I clicked the door unlock button a few more times. As an adult, I’ve learned the incredibly stupid habit of doing the same thing 15 times and hoping for a different result.

I shifted my groceries to my left hand and tried to push the key into the door lock. Of course I was mumbling to myself like a lost insurance salesman, muttering the usual patois of incriminating yet mild curse words normally associated with minor annoyances. (You all know these immortal words so I won’t bore you with a definitive list.)

Instead of heeding the resistance as I attempted to insert the key again, I pushed decently hard. The key, of course, didn’t slip into the keyhole. I’m certain I had the dumbest possible expression on my face. My imaginary and impending starvation had rendered me incapable of logical thought.

Just as I was about to do something really stupid and get the key irretrievably lodged in the door, a very commanding shrill female voice cut through the air: “What are you DOING?”

I turned and a short old lady was standing a few behind me to the left, exhibiting a mix of curiosity and hostility on her face.

As many of you know, my mouth often runs ahead of me to clear a dangerous path for the funny yet idiotic things I often say. My brain operates on its own initiative and connects directly to my mouth.

“I’m trying to steal this car!” I said, in a voice that I thought conveyed witty and confident humor.

Obviously, in that split second my brain registered the fact that I drive a white Ford, rather than a white Hyundai, the one warding off my attempts to get inside it with my key. I did as I often do and belched out something that I would think is funny.

It took a few attempts, but I finally convinced the nice old lady that I was at the wrong car and had just told her I was trying to steal her car to be funny. I clicked my key fob in the direction of my car, situated an entire aisle over and the lights blinked briefly.

“I forgot where my car was,” I repeated as I noted she was buying my version of events.

“Gingko,” the lady said. Although she didn’t laugh, I realized that she had just trolled me elegantly, as she clicked her key fob and got into her late model Hyundai to drive away.

Tomorrow, I will be 18,000 days old. For many years, I have periodically went back and tracked my age by total number of days since birth. It is fascinating. I know I’ve mentioned it before. Each time I do, though, someone discovers this for the first time. It’s such a cool thing to watch someone’s eyes light up with the discovery that they’ve been doing birthdays wrong their entire lives. (Conversely, it might also give them reason to understand just how tangled my upstairs wires might really be.)

Though the knee-jerk explanation from others might be “what a typical guy,” I’ve never been one to appreciate my birthday. For people who are close to me, a heart-felt expression of love and well wishes – given on any day of the year, covers all the bases. Despite having written much about birthdays and the milestones people bring to their celebrations, I’m still uneasy with them in general.

While my dad was in prison in Indiana, I mostly lived with my maternal grandparents. I didn’t know them as independent adults or as troubled people with long histories. By the time of my existence, my grandpa was a much quieter man than the hell-raiser he had once been. While I do have some interesting memories when I was quite young, my golden memories are those years around 1975 and 76. Grandpa told me stories about his war, about following too closely to a tank and being saved by mud, about why he loved sardines canned in that horrible sauce – the smell so strong I would want to pour bleach into my nostrils. Most of these memories, though, are stolen from me, from being too young to understand it or capture them. Also, grandpa had to be careful about not talking too loudly around grandma Nellie, whose ears sometimes functioned as directional antennas. I escaped my youth with a woeful lack of understanding of how complex my grandad’s war experience was. Since I was his favorite grandkid, had cancer not killed him, I would have been able to write a book about what he had to say. His death forked my life into a massively different path and I always wonder what stories I would have known if he had survived until I was a little older. He let me drink coffee when I was a toddler, showed me how to form letters by seeing the Dolly Madison symbol on tv (which looks like a cursive ‘l’), taught me to love salt pork (the most un-vegetarian food ever created by mankind), and listened to me by actually listening. It was a shock to me later in life when I learned how different he was in later life compared to his youth.

When I was growing up, before the internet became king, I would have to resort to using books to calculate how many days old I was. It helped me understand leap years quicker than most people, too. Now, I can visit one of several websites and it will compute and tell me my age in days. That’s a lot of Mondays. I think of grandad and say “eighteen thousand” aloud and laugh a little. If you’ve ever learned a foreign language, you can appreciate the complexity of hearing another language being spelled out like that.

I’ve never seen a child not be thrilled and happy to hear how many days old they are. Measuring your life in days doesn’t rely on knowing how many days are in a week, a month, or a year. It’s just simple math, the kind you can scrawl on your bedroom wall, just like they do in prison movies. If a child was born in mid-2005, it would sound much more interesting to say, “You’re 4,000 days old today!” and celebrate that instead of the traditional birthday. PS: It would also save you 2 out of 3 of your birthday parties.

As for me, the exception for me regarding memorable birthdays of my youth would be my 5th birthday. My family would later move to Northwest Arkansas, leaving central Arkansas and the flat spaces of Monroe County. My grandma wanted me to have a happy day and since she was always fattening me up like a Christmas turkey, she made me a white cake from a box, with white frosting and candles, something I didn’t have any other year of my childhood. My cousin Michael Wayne was there with me, mischievously wiping his finger along the cake and eating the frosting every single time my grandma Nellie turned away. Even though he was only about 3 or 4, he had already acquired the mischievous way of life. (The cake was probably missing half the frosting by the time she cut it.) We drank almost two entire glass quart bottles of Coca-Cola with the cake. Both Michael Wayne and I had all the cake we wanted. It was a great day and the best kind of birthday: someone who loved me, lots of laughter, and an emphasis of shared time. After making a mess on grandma’s table, Michael and I went outside to excavate the ditch along the country road.

My birthday is an arbitrary milestone, one created from an imperfect calendar. It holds no emotional significance for me and doesn’t warrant a pause in the world. I know there are many people like me, but we are classified as ‘party-poopers’ by those who crave a reason to celebrate.

I vote we forego the calendar rituals and create other ways to share hilarity and confections. The need for an observed milestone is what detracts from so many occasions. Absent all prompts, how often would celebrate someone’s life? How often would you remember them? How frequently would you salute their service, acknowledge their impact on society, or give thanks to everything in your life that deserves it?

Let’s have a cake. Let’s sing together off-key, but let’s leave the excuse of a birthday behind and choose a better way. And definitely, let’s start counting our age in increments of 1000.

I’m 18,000 tomorrow!