My birthday is just a few days from now. I’ve had several careers, experienced life at the extremes, and while I would do a slew of things differently, I am where I am, and the scales tip decidedly toward an incredible journey.

For my entire life, my birthday was marked by picnics and fireworks since we always celebrated a day early. When I was young, relatives and neighbors all gathered at or around our house to watch fireworks my uncle picked up in the city. I was twelve before I understood the festivities were not for me.

Through the years here at Aerie, my son and I have gone down the hill to the river where we can see clearly all the way out into the Chesapeake as well as up the Rappahannock. Some neighbors just down river set off beautiful ones from their widow’s walk, and across on the Northern Neck fireworks light up the sky from Tides Inn in Irvington, the pier at Willoughby Restaurant in White Stone, and all the way down to Windmill Point. On the south shore of the river we can see them rise from Deltaville clear on up to Grey’s Point Campground. It usually starts on the first or second, this year in particular since the Fourth is a Tuesday, though even then it will be spectacular.

But this time the show has been stolen; quite literally something else has taken the light–the moon, which is full on the third this month, sat massive and round and slightly orange from the dust of the Canadian Fires. No matter what fireworks exploded, I couldn’t stop looking at the moon, I couldn’t help but know that everyone was looking at the moon, everywhere they could see it. Our monthly display.

I’m about to turn older. I can remember sitting cross-legged on the grass, almost sixty years ago. I’m still here. Despite some years of bad decisions, wrong turns, and helpless abandon, I just watched an orange moon rise out of the east tonight and felt like a little boy, sitting cross-legged, looking at my life illuminated before me.

First and foremost, birthdays remind us in fine mathematical style that we are alive and are still part of the population which constantly expands like bottle rockets in the deep blue sky. It bends my small mind to think of this reality that I’m certain everyone knows but few contemplate: I shared this planet with every other human who ever breathed the air.

Just in my lifetime: Mother Theresa. Malcolm X. Neil Armstrong. Jimi Hendrix. Pope Paul the Sixth. Lech Walesa. St. John Paul the Second. Thomas Merton. President General Eisenhower. Elvis. Pablo Picasso. Albert Schweitzer.

Rwandan Tutsis. The Lost Boys of Sudan. Steven Biko. Pol Pot.

I shared time with these people; these saints and sinners brushed my sleeve simply by sharing the earth during my stay. We have a loose connection to miracles and massacres.

This world has some serious issues; always has. It is at best, though, a hotel, and every once in a while I take a look at the register to remind myself who else stayed here. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Mohammed, Ivan the Terrible, Ghengas Khan, all guests just over the slope of the horizon, just beyond some small slice of linear time. On the same human trajectory as mine but before is Geronimo, Moses, Jesus, think about the gentle bend of time, the careen of place that separates me from the disciples, the Visigoths, the founding fathers. All here but just before.

Closer to now, when I look inside the lines of my coming and going, between those two rays shooting off from my birth, I can see the souls who at one time or another shared with me this spinning blue wad. Not short of miraculous, we claim the same particles of stardust, and that’s what keeps me looking around when I walk down some city street; I want to know who else is on earth with me.

I was born a month ago. I waded through foreign rivers last month. My son was born last Tuesday. Fleeting. Swift. Impatient. And my thin life falls on the same graph as Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. And Grandma Moses, who painted her last work about the time I learned to swim, was born during the Civil War. I was alive when someone was alive who was alive during the Civil War.

Carl Jung lectured during my youth, and Ty Cobb watched the same Mets players as me. When I was still cutting new teeth and outgrowing my Keds, I could have headed downtown with my Dad and possibly been on the same train as William Faulkner, ee cummings or Marilyn Monroe. I might have passed them on the street, maybe stood in line at some drug store counter with my mom and behind us because of the blending of circumstance might have been Sylvia Plath or Sam Cooke; Nat King Cole; Otis Redding. We have overlapping lives. On a Venn graph, we share the shaded space.

Judy Garland and I watched the New York Jets in Super Bowl Three. When I was born World War One vets weren’t yet senior citizens and World War Two Vets were in their thirties. Vietnam isn’t history to me; it is my childhood, my early teens. The fall of Saigon was announced over the loud speakers at my high school.

There are empty fields save monuments and markers where soldiers died defending this land against the British, against ourselves, and they stood where I stand and watched the hazy sun rise. Same sun; same beach, same blessed Commonwealth. Don’t mistake history for “back then.” Those people just happened to check out before us. It could have been us. It is us now, watching the orange moon like we do, noticing the calm river, sharing time with loved ones, thinking about others.

And it won’t be long before our lives overlap with the crying call of a newborn Einstein. Did you see that boy running at the park? That girl climbing the tree at her home? Did I just pass by some senator, some Cicero or Socrates, some St Augustine?

Like a couple today buying the same house that young lovers lived in centuries ago, like sour-dough starter. Like a relay race.

My adult son is trying to get a shot of fireworks in front of the moon, but the angle is wrong. When he was just five months old I held him with my hand over his ear, the other ear against my chest, as we watched fireworks out over the Atlantic in Virginia Beach. That was last Friday or so.

What a life. How many times do we reinvent ourselves? How often to we stop in our tracks, get out of the rush and inertia of humanity pushing from behind, and let it all go by, catch the moon over the Chesapeake? Why do we so rarely rest easy in the love of those near and of those still far away when our stay in this world in our time is brief at best. God I love getting older, knowing more people, turning the pages. I love anticipation.

I like knowing the people I know now, these brothers and sisters, whose overlapping lives linger just within my time frame; we share the same air, watch the same news and celebrate the same wins, note the same celestial bodies reminding us of our worth. In some divine book somewhere, these people and I are on the same page. My parents, my siblings, my children, my God what grace to have shared this passage from cradle to grave.