Birthday greetings no longer came in a personal fashion. He hadn’t received a card through the mail in years, and the idea of personal correspondence brought about a sort of guttural chortle that frightened small children. These days, it was not only encouraged but rather quite fashionable to instead display the felicitations via social media so that other barely involved well-wishers could comment about the effort put forth to make the greeting stand out. Video links worked well. Regurgitated memes containing scatological references tended to be common.
Text messages were altogether phased out; they were far too private and marketers hated them because it was now illegal to scan their contents for keywords thanks to recently-passed legislation sneaked into a defense bill at the last minute by a congressman from Massachusetts who was found dead at his home just weeks later, face down in a plate of tuna carpaccio.
Email was reserved solely for corporations who possessed his actual birthday by way of credit card processors, and so his inbox became flooded with empty gestures disguised as caring. Banana Republic wanted him to look his best for his 37th, offering him ten percent off of twisted Celtic knot cufflinks which had been made by a nine year old in the Philippines for twenty-six cents and were now available for just $56.99, plus tax. Audi USA warned that his sex appeal to both men and women was rapidly decreasing and for just $489 per month he could have the all new TTRS convertible with 19-inch wheel package, carbon fiber mirror covers, and an implied ménage-a-trois with a flirtatious redhead and a Cristiano Ronaldo lookalike. His HMO congratulated him on another year with statistics on prostate cancer and a polite reminder that he was overdue to have his GP explore his rectum for abnormalities.
Perhaps the rudest inchoation to aging is when one finds that first lone, grey hair mocking you in the mirror, glowing like the sheen on the cheek bone of an alabaster doll. One either plucks it in an act of churlish defiance or merely allows it to stay, welcoming its presence with a slight exhalation and a shrugging of the shoulders. Although he aggressively started with the former approach, the hairs soon multiplied exponentially, and quickly he found his tweezers outnumbered. If his thirties were to be spent with salt and pepper locks, so be it. “Youth be damned!”, he thought over and over in his head, increasing the volume of his internal monologue with each repetition, trying desperately to drown out the shrill cries of the colicky infant sitting just meters away on the crowded beach.
It was not the Floridian sun that then made him furrow his brow, but rather the acute pain near the front of his head which, medical professionals would later tell his family, was indicative of the onset of a cerebral aneurism. His death was altogether fatidical, described in painstaking detail two weeks prior in a rambling, Scotch-induced late-night email sent seemingly only to his sister, but with a forty-five-person blind carbon copy list that included current and former coworkers, past lovers, and his near-deaf octogenarian neighbor Honoria.