Happy Birthday to me!
Yes, it's hard to believe that I made it to 52. One asks if the birthday celebrant feels his or her age and 99% of the time the answer is a bold NO! And I must include myself in this today.While of course there are obvious signs of aging such as the frost on one's head( white hair), an earlier bedtime( but not always here in Buenos Aires) or just a slower pace in many phases of life.
But I can say that my only birthday wasn't on 15 March, 1959. I have had many! You might ask, "how can you have more than one day when you were born?"
The first thing that may come to many people's mind is the chance of a new life due to one of many serious diseases or operations which one has survived. I must thank God and everyone and thing in between that this is not my case!
Many of you know that I am a great traveler and thus have been in many distant places; most of the time, my journeys were experiences which hugely enriched my life. I lived in communist Poland during the time of Solidarity, Lech Walesa and martial law; my years of living in a different Argentina than today under a military dictatorship. I saw tanks roll down the streets of Lusaka, Zambia in an attenpted coup d'etat. I was in Salisbury, Rhodesia during the civil war in 1979-1980 when the country eventually became the new Zimbabwe, later to be a success story followed by the drastic changes in the past years which have turned it into a nation and economy worse than any banana republic. I was arrested in Bukhara, Uzbekistan during the Soviet period in the early 80s for selling consumer goods at an open market and locked in a Soviet jail, fortunately with a release within 24 hrs. The ironic thing was the next day, Ronald Reagen was meeting with Leonid Brezhnev for the first time and the official Soviet television interviewed me on my thoughts of the historic meeting as I was a foreigner in the USSR. And there are many more truly life-threatening situations which I have lived through which I won't put here in order not to scare some readers, such as my sister and a few close friends who will tie me down with a rope or chain.
But I will mention 2 which truly gave me another life.
One was only last year when I was in Santaigo, Chile during the 8.8 Richter scale earthquake on 27 February, 2010 and the other was on 17 March, 1995(soon to be 16 years in 2 days) when I was taken hostage on a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to El Obeid, Sudan. for 3 days; the only thing I will say now is that I thought I would die in both circumstances and as you can well see today, this wasn't the case! No one could be happier than I! To find out more details about these and other experiences, you'll have to wait and then buy the book!
So yes ,I will celebrate my first birthday of 52 years ago but this doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate every day that we wake up as it it was our birthday.
Happy birthday to you all!
SES
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