Turning 40, Base 11

Earlier today, Lilly took to closing my home office door on Ann, and holding it shut for a while, telling Ann, “You’re going to jail!” Ann protested this treatment by hitting a fist on the carpeted floor and saying “Why, Why, Why?”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard her use that useful word. But I suspect she got it from a scene in SpongeBob SquarePants. One of the characters was thrown in jail, and may have reacted that way, but later grew to like it because she didn’t have to deal with SpongeBob any more. (I sympathize. Curiously, SpongeBob at one point actually said the jailed character had been “institutionalized.”)

We returned a SBSP disk the other day, and there aren’t any more new ones available from Netflix for now. But the hypercheerful yellow sponge is still with us, in the form of a drinking cup, a toothbrush, toothpaste and Band-Aids. Oh, for 1% of the merchandising revenue of that character. Probably even 0.1% would make my job search unnecessary.

I turned 44 this week. I don’t think I’ve meditated on my birthdays much, if ever, here. But that’s a nice repeating double-digit number. If we counted in base 11, I’d have turned 40.

I spent the day in scenic Schaumburg, Illinois, dining in the evening at a good Mexican restaurant we’d long wanted to try. Contrast with my 33rd birthday: spent it in Bangkok, in an un-air-conditioned guesthouse, eating at the little place downstairs (man, the food was good in Thailand). When I turned 22, I was in Lüneburg, West Germany -- been a while since one needed to put it that way. The best meal in that town was halb Henchen mit Pommes Frites at a greasy spoon my friends discovered.

As for 11, I’m fairly sure I was it home in San Antonio, though I did spend some time in the summer of 1972 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, with my Aunt Sue and Uncle Ken. The Democratic National Convention was on TV with I visited them, so that would have been the second week of July.

I had to Google “Democratic Convention 1972” to get the date, of course. I’d forgotten that both major party conventions were in Miami Beach that year, with the Republican one in August. Maybe it was chosen for ease of crowd control: a narrow island with a handful of streets.