Birthdays and Billions of Miles

Unchanging steakhouses, fickle hip neighborhoods and photons soaring across boundless vacuums - they all come to a head, while I'm paying a babysitter.

I went to Peter Luger Steakhouse with my wife for my birthday few years back. It’s a favorite, and not just for the food, but also for personal reasons.

My parents took me to Peter Luger when I graduated college. I cemented a dear and lasting friendship there. And for thirteen years, I lived two blocks from it. If you’ve ever been, you know that it’s a place whose decor, menu and general manner resists time. My grandfather, a teamster boss in Long Island City in the ‘60s and ‘70s, used to eat there several times a week. And I doubt he’d find too much out of place today.

The neighborhood around it is the opposite story. If not for the Williamsburg Bridge, it’s mostly unrecognizable from what it was a few years ago. The disconnect makes me dizzy in a bad way, and I’ve mostly steered clear of the neighborhood since I moved away ten years ago. That particular birthday dinner was one exception.

I am mocked

Time is always a slippery, mocking bastard. It bites its thumb and thumbs its nose at me. Normally, time can take care of itself. I can think about it or not. But on my birthday, my favorite thing to think of - myself - directly collides with this very sore spot. It’s one reason birthdays are so charged for good and for ill.

Like you, I’ve thought a lot about time. I’ve written about time (see November’s “Is Our Calendar a Ruin or Home?” among others) here. I wrote a novel to try and ambush it and win some tiny victory. But still.

And on that particular birthday, my 45th, I confronted being a year older - a condition I’d done nothing in particular to achieve, and which I couldn’t do much to avert. At the same time, I confronted a neighborhood profoundly and irrevocably changed from the one where I’d spent my twenties and early thirties. It had gone on without me rather nicely, at least by its new standards.

Through the evening, the cocktails, the tomatoes and onions, the slab bacon, I felt as though I was sliding off the face of the earth at a quickening clip. And looking around my old neighborhood, I had the sensation that the earth had lost its taste for me, and was trying to shake me off its back.

HBD and bad moods

I’m not a huge birthday guy. I get it for kids. But I’m ambivalent. I made my birthday private on social media. All those platform-driven Happy Birthdays feel forced and robotic.

Everyone likes to say Happy Birthday! But how the fuck do they know? Here I am shelling out the rough equivalent of all the money I’ve made from six months of weekly essays for a dinner, some drinks, a babysitter and cabs - all for the privilege of sitting as a helpless witness to my own slow eviction from the earth.

But sure, whatever you say.

5.2 billion miles

That birthday, as I tried to make sense of all the changes around me, the best I could do was to think of time not as time, but distance.

Each year, my home - New York City - goes roughly 1.1 million miles as it spins around the Earth’s axis. The Earth, meanwhile, travels 584 million miles around the sun each year. In that same year, the solar system trudges 4.5 billion miles on its trip around the galactic center. So each birthday, we celebrate roughly 5.2 billion miles of travel. 

After 5.2 billion miles, who wouldn’t gain a few pounds and lose a little hair? After 5.2 billion miles, of course the hardware store would go out of business and reopen as a hardware-store themed craft beer bar.

Nonetheless, there I was, on my forty-fifth birthday, celebrating 234 billion miles traveled, on the edge of a bad mood.

24 days

A hundred miles can be hard to visualize. It’s about two hours in a car if there’s not too much traffic. Five point two billion miles is so long a span as to be unimaginable. The only tolerable measurement for it is distance in light speed. Five point two billion miles is about 465 light minutes. Each year, the average person travels as far as a photon goes in 7.75 light hours across a vacuum.

Given an average lifespan of about 76 years, the average American physically travels about as long as a photon does over the course of 24 days.

You can tell I’m having a hard time with something when I break out the math.

But we had fun

After a shaky start, I had a good time. It was a good birthday. My wife and I ate and drank and had a laugh about the lifestyle laboratory our formerly shabby neighborhood had become. In the cab ride back, I regaled the driver with a whole spiel about how we were celebrating my successful travels across nearly a quarter trillion miles.

He didn’t have much to add on that front. Maybe he was a metric-system guy.

This week

is my birthday. It’s been a good year. And part of that is having so many great readers like you. But if you want to go overboard and put a cherry on top of these particular 5.2 billion miles, you can always subscribe.

Selected bibliography

Danny Jock, who did the image for this piece, and who is taking commissions