A quiet day

The only reminder that today is my birthday, aside from my having to buy a Goldilocks cake before coming to work this morning, is the slew of greetings I've been receiving in my mobile. It all started on New Year's eve, when a friend of mine in the neighborhood got drunk and announced in his booming voice on the videoke microphone that the store owner who lives on our street had set up outside his house, that hey everybody, January 2 is Tony's birthday! Some 12 hours after that, when the clock was a few minutes away from January 2, another neighbor followed suit by messaging me happy birthday, apparently wanting to be the first one to send me her greetings. Some four minutes after the clock had struck 12 midnight, my mobile beeped again with a message from another friend asking for a birthday treat.

When I arrived in the office this morning, I was expecting today to be an ordinary day, quiet, calm and without unnecessary fuss, because for a long time I'd been celebrating this occasion in a sort of low-profile way. That's probably because celebrating your birthday at the tail-end of the holidays is an anti-climax. And so today has been rather quiet, just as I wanted, with only a small cake to somehow mark the occasion in the office, except that my mobile has been getting quite a lot of birthday greetings. In Spain, I would receive about three or four greetings in my email or mobile. But since this morning, messages have been coming in even from people I did not expect would mark this date on their calendars. That's actually great and something to be thankful for.

It reminds you, for better or for worse, that you are in your country.