Aging is a funny thing. I can sometimes feel like it was just yesterday I was 18 but it’s been decades since then. A song or a smell can take me back to a specific moment in life: standing at my locker in the 7th grade or roller skating at the roller rink. And in the same way I find milestones fascinating.
I’m always doing numbers and dates in my head, that such as such-and-such years ago today I was doing this or going there or with so-and-so. I remember birthdates even after all these years, even of people I haven’t been in touch with for decades. Today is one of those such days but with much more importance.
Today is October 12, 2024. Fifty years ago today (actually late in the evening, closer to midnight of October 13) Donald Alan Wicht II (aka Donnie) was born. Yes, today would have been his 50th birthday. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand we would have had him with us through all the memorable events in our lives, growing up with his cousins, holidays, birthdays, and always being the first grandchild of my parents’. We would have had him with us to share his milestones and maybe bringing children into the world (oh how his mother would have loved being a grandma).
But maybe I’m being selfish in my reminiscing of what could have been because on the other hand he would have had to experience sadness, losing his grandparents and his two uncles, and any other tragedies that has happened in our lives.
On the same note, Rhonda would have been turning 70 on October 13, 2024. Donnie was born just an hour or so before Rhonda’s 20th birthday.
As the story goes, the way my mother told it (she was there in Austin for Donnie’s birth), Rhonda wasn’t dilating and the doctor decided to do a C-section. The doctor said something to the effect that if we wait just an hour (or so) the baby could be born on his mother’s birthday but my mother, who by this time was extremely agitated that Rhonda had been in labor for too long, looked at the doctor and said, “This baby is going to have its own birthday.” Yes, that’s how my mother was, an outspoken mother hen. So Donnie got his own birthday.
So to Donnie (and Rhonda, tomorrow) I want to wish a happy heavenly birthday. I know they know how much they are missed and certainly how much they were and are loved, and that I do look forward to the day I get to see them, and the rest of my family, again.
Even though the years go on for those of us left behind, you will always be forever four.
Email: randdjustice@gmail.com
Justice for Rhonda and Donnie 