A Date Is A Date Is A Date

For those of us using the Gregorian calendar (as opposed to the Julian, Lunar, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Islamic, Hebrew, Germanic, or ISO Week Date), today is 09-09-09. The internet and news programs have had numerous articles in the past few days about numerology and the significance given to the date. For the record, as a card-carrying pragmatist with a degree in physics, “numerology” is 100%, high-grade bullshit. But that doesn’t mean that the day with the repeating digits isn’t significant to me personally, and I was surprised when it snuck up on me.

One of the reasons that I note the date is because September 9th is the birthday of a friend and co-worker of many years. That makes it more memorable to me that March 3rd, May 5th, July 7th, August 8th, October 10th, or December 12th. (It’s left as an exercise to the student to figure out why January 1st, February 2nd, April 4th, June 6th, and November 11th are more memorable than average.) But beyond that, it was a very closely related “special” date ten years ago that first got September 9th stuck in a prominent part of my brain.

It was on “9-9-99” that my divorce from The Kids’ Mother was finalized.

We had been separated for almost three years by that time and I was even more years into that unexpected phase of life that earned me the “MomDude” non de plume, but a five-minute meeting with a judge on that day of many nines made it official and permanent. No muss, no fuss, no screaming, no scenes, no lawyers. The fact that our divorce was “amicable” is one of the only good aspects of what is by default a grueling and painful process.

So now I’m surprised by the fact that today I was completely blindsided by the ten-year anniversary of that reasonably significant life event. I remembered the friend’s birthday. I saw all of the BS on the idiot box about the numbers in the dates all lining up. I noted that the big “Beatlemania” release of new video games and the latest Apple Computer conferences were today, probably not by coincidence. I am looking forward to seeing the new Tim Burton film “9” that opens today. But somehow that ten-year anniversary was hidden from me by The Idiot Subconscious.

At least, it was hidden until yesterday afternoon. As so often happens, The Idiot Subconscious picks the most off-guard times for its reveals, maximizing the “shock and awe” effect on my mental equilibrium. Or maybe it just seems that way, an egocentric selection effect of some sort. I’ll have to ask The Village Wise Woman.

From there it gets fuzzy, meaning that I’m not quite sure I how feel about it all, or how I should feel about it. For one thing, it’s been ten years, pure and simple. A lot of that pain and grief has faded simply due to time. A lot of the structural/logistical nightmares and frustration have vanished into memory due to changing circumstances. The kids have grown, I’ve remarried, The Kids’ Mother passed away a few years back. Yeah, it was something of a red-letter day at the time, but that time has passed. Yeah, ten years is one of those “big” anniversaries, but I haven’t exactly been having celebratory anniversary parties every September 9th for the previous nine years. (Well, OK, there was that one wild party in my head on the first anniversary…) In short, we’ve moved on.

Right?

Maybe I’m just worried about encroaching senility, which is more likely not senility at all but simply an odd foible of an imperfect human brain. Is the problem that it really, really seems that I should have remembered, and it bothers me that I didn’t, that I forgot? Is it just that I’m caught off guard by the fact that I didn’t remember, juxtaposed with the perception (correct or otherwise) that it should be an important anniversary?

Too many angels dancing on the head of a pin, too much worrying about it, too much trying to understand and control rather than simply being. No doubt it’s the result of a Catholic school upbringing and the latent guilt that it tried to imbed in every cell of my body. It can make you crazy, and nearly has at times.

But, hey!! Remember, it’s the new me that’s in charge, and I hereby declare that it doesn’t matter that I forgot, or didn’t remember, or didn’t notice, or whatever happened. The date and the anniversary are worth noting, but only in proper perspective, and that perspective is that we have moved on and we are continuing to move on. As they say when they fly the Blackbird, “Yeah, though I fly through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am at Mach 8, 70,000 feet and climbing!!”

Maybe I should just go get an XBox 360 and the deluxe version of The Beatles Rockband and stay up until about 4:30 in the morning rocking out.