A Birthday Spent Mostly Alone—but not Lonely

An excerpt of David W. Berner's forthcoming "Daylight Saving Time: The Power of Growing Older"

The author at a casita in Northern New Mexico, a region that plays a role in his book, Daylight Saving Time.

Excerpted from Daylight Saving Time: The Power of Growing Older by David W. Berner, Collective Ink Publishing, UK

The gray that seeps through the curtains is deep and yet murky like the light in a scene from an old movie. It must be quite early. I roll over and nestle against a pillow, not about to return to sleep—I like it here. I am alone and it is a good place to linger. After all, it must be at least an hour before sunrise, and it’s my birthday.

Eventually, I become curious, and I reach for my phone. It is later than I had thought. Nearly 7 a.m. There is a text on the screen from my younger son. The words sent sometime overnight. I love sharing my birthday with you, he has written, and wish there was a way I could share this with my future son or daughter. I love you like crazy dad. Happy birthday brother. My son was born late at night on my thirty-sixth birthday. Gifts come in many ways.

My wife is already awake and dressed. She returns to the bedroom, leans into the sheets, and kisses me.

“It’s your birthday,” she says, her voice animated.

“That, it is,” I mutter, not yet convinced of my morning footing.

In the bathroom mirror I see a man, one who is old with gray hair and tired eyes, yet this is a man who does not feel old. Yes, morning has yet to be shaken from these bones, but old is someone else. Not me. I angle closer to the glass and scratch my white beard, several days of growth. I think I’ll keep it for a while. I think I’ve earned it. The reflection reminds me of a black-and-white photograph of a man I had recently seen in a story on the web about art in New Mexico. He is a painter who lives somewhere near the small town of Madrid. He carries unruly white hair and a scruffy snowy beard. His stare is intense. Sun-soaked skin. In a few months I hope to be in Los Cerillos, the town just up the dusty road from Madrid. Maybe I can say hello.

In the bathroom mirror I see a man, one who is old with gray hair and tired eyes, yet this is a man who does not feel old. Yes, morning has yet to be shaken from these bones, but old is someone else. Not me.

I don’t think much of my birthday anymore. Not that I don’t like it, it is only that I am more indifferent than interested. It is not about aging, the slow and inevitable march, but instead it is the idea of time, that manmade concept. What does the counting of years really mean anyway? Still, my son’s text and my wife’s kiss are precious, and as I remain before the mirror, I am aware through my still weary eyes of the splendor of gratitude.

Preorder the book.

Before long, I’m in the shed. The space heater needs more time, so I’m bundled in fleece and a watchman’s cap. A breeze is building. I hear a wind chime tingling and I write to the music. Through the window I see the last of the season’s leaves on the grass, and in the distance, a neighbor has left a string of outdoor lights on through the night; the bulbs glow yellow in the bare trees. I am alone in the softness of it. Picasso said that without solitude, no serious work is possible. But solitude without time may instead be loneliness. Time can do that. In these early hours, although I write, the solitude before me is more meditation than work. It is a gift.

I return to the house. My wife has the radio on, the news on NPR. I tolerate it as I make coffee. This is not a gift, this news of the day. So, I shake from it and think of the casita in the Chihuahuan Desert along the Turquoise Trail south of Santa Fe, east of the Rio Grande, where prospectors once came to find gold, where the desert rose blooms, where the stars are impossible to count.

As my wife asks what I would like for my birthday dinner, my phone dings. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! The text is from my stepdaughter in Iowa. Another gift.

“I have those pork chops,” my wife says.

“I could do that,” I say.

“Or would you rather go out to eat? I know you like going out.”

“Really, I’m good with what you decide.”

“We could order pizza. Open some wine with it?”

Truth is, I don’t want to decide. I don’t want to make decisions. No decisions today. That would be a nice present.

By now, I have opened my computer on the kitchen counter to go through school emails before heading for the train. Facebook says there are 18 notifications. Last year, I was persuaded, I believe by my wife, to add my birthdate to my Facebook profile. I had been reluctant. “Don’t you want people to wish you a good day?” she had asked. I have 18 good wishes on Facebook. Some from people I haven’t spoken with in many years.

I don’t think much of my birthday anymore. Not that I don’t like it, it is only that I am more indifferent than interested. It is not about aging, the slow and inevitable march, but instead it is the idea of time, that manmade concept. What does the counting of years really mean anyway?

I catch the later train to the city and will arrive with just enough time to make a scheduled meeting in my department. But on the way, there’s a schedule notification on my phone. The meeting is canceled. I am now traveling to nowhere and suddenly with nothing planned, an unexpected gift. When I arrive in the city, my mood changes, and on the short walk to the coffee shop I am mildly nauseated, slightly out of breath. When I had my heart attack several years ago, I had similar symptoms, but they included intense sweating and a heavy chest. I am experiencing neither this morning, and I keep my pace, but find myself wondering: Who is it that gets to live a long life? I was lucky with my attack. No damage to the heart. I could outlive my father by many years if I take care.

Others, however, are not so lucky. Young people are shot dead in schools. Babies die of cancer. Yet, there are those who have abused their bodies for decades who keep on. With only a block remaining on my walk to the café and still not feeling myself, my phone pings. I keep walking but glance at the screen. It’s a long text from a former student. I order coffee and some brown toast, secure a seat, and read. Along with a happy birthday message is a detailed assessment of what he says I have meant to him, that I have not only been a teacher but a friend. I have inspired and steadied him. Supported and guided. You made me cry, I text back. Mission accomplished, he replies.

I’m thinking of the desert once again, and through a Google search find that Namib is the oldest desert in the world, some 80 million years. New Mexico’s Chihuahuan is a baby. The age is unclear, different at each website, but it appears parts of the Chihuahuan are only a few million years old. It occurs to me that discovering the age of a desert must be such intricate work, taking years of study in ecology and geology. Later this spring when we are in Los Cerrillos, I hope to walk the scrappy ancient ground, step on long trails surrounded by agave and sage, and primeval rocks.

DAvid W. Berner's writing shed, inspired somewhat by Dylan Thomas's writing shed in Wales.

It was a decade ago in Navajo Nation, in the high desert just outside the Grand Canyon, when I found myself moved by something beyond my comprehension. It was a cross-country journey with my sons, and we had spent the day walking the edge of the great gorge. Late in the day after traveling a few miles from the lodge at the North Rim, we arrived at a vista overlooking a vast open land of red and brown. In the warm breeze and under a mix of sun, silvery clouds, and a spitting drizzle, a double rainbow appeared at the expansive sky’s highest point. The birds were silenced, the roaming cattle stilled. That moment was the envy of angels and I cried without fully understanding. Where I hope to find myself this spring is more than 500 miles east of where those angels had been, yet I will stand in the same ecosystem, the same prehistoric land as the Chihuahuan, and I will search beyond the Rio Grande to the distant mountains for the past and the future, and my heart will hunt the western sky for whatever it was that placed its tender hands on me ten years ago.

After a few bites of toast and sitting quietly in the café, I feel better. I am also at one of my favorite tables, near the south window in the corner, a spot that gives me joy, like resting in your favorite chair wrapped in a heavy quilt. And so, I write. And in the hours that pass I work to the clatter that surrounds me—honest voices and bits of laughter. There are clinking ceramic dishes and musical notes emanating from a speaker at the far end, notes nearly indiscernible in this familiar noise.

Midafternoon arrives and so has sunshine. I walk to the bookstore at the university building on State Street to search for a volume on New Mexico. The travel section is tucked behind the coffee bar. It takes me many minutes to discover the guides, and after endlessly searching the shelves, I find nothing on New Mexico. Not one book. There are guides for the entire American Southwest, Arizona, and Texas, but not specifically New Mexico. I search the travel-writing section. Nothing. It is as if New Mexico has been forgotten or dismissed. On the rack of folding maps there is Paris and New York and even a large map of Alaska, but again, nothing for Albuquerque, nothing for Santa Fe, nothing for New Mexico. Dismayed, I open my phone and order online a laminated map of what the poets call The Land of Enchantment. It will be delivered tomorrow.

Loneliness is all around us yet unremarkable and often undetectable, a product of the absence of connection or intimacy, hidden inside ourselves. Aloneness, the emotion that has carried my day, my birthday, is a different matter. With aloneness, I am in the presence of myself. When I was a kid, late into the night under the blankets of my bed, I listened to faraway signals on my transistor radio. I was the kid who read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by flashlight. Alone. Not lonely.

When I walk to the train later in the day for the ride home, the late November light is fading. I have spent most of this birthday alone. Not by myself, for that’s impossible in the city, but still alone, alone in my thoughts and alone in my work. At the corner near Dearborn Street is a tiny old diner, or maybe it is made to look old to capture the imagination, I’m not certain. Still, at the window sits a man, maybe in his seventies, in a heavy coat and a brown fedora. He holds his coffee mug with both hands, his elbows on the counter before him. He is alone.

A few blocks south of where I walk, on a wall at the Art Institute is what some have called the art world’s most poignant image of American loneliness, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. I can’t help but think of that painting now, the man and woman at one end of the counter and another singular figure at the other, slumped over their coffees, the dark streets beyond them. Who is more alone, the couple or the man? And what about the one who sees this scene from across the street, the view of the painter? Isn’t he, too, lonely?

Undoubtedly, loneliness and aloneness are not the same. We assume that those in Hopper’s image are isolated or forlorn. We would also believe, even if only for a moment, that the man I walked by in the diner on Dearborn is a lonely soul. Loneliness is all around us yet unremarkable and often undetectable, a product of the absence of connection or intimacy, hidden inside ourselves. Aloneness, the emotion that has carried my day, my birthday, is a different matter. With aloneness, I am in the presence of myself. When I was a kid, late into the night under the blankets of my bed, I listened to faraway signals on my transistor radio. I was the kid who read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by flashlight. Alone. Not lonely. What an immense gift this is, this aloneness I carry now, walking late-autumn city streets in the creeping shadows of skyscrapers.