Taking Stock on Thursday: New Packaging
For reasons that I still can't go into (stay tuned!), 2006 was not what I would call a fun year. But progress was made on several fronts, not the least of them my personal appearance. Without trying, I lost fifteen pounds. (There were times when I just went hungry instead of snacking, but even that didn't rise to the level of "trying.") I stopped wearing shorts all the time. (They were nice shorts, and I had them dry-cleaned and pressed, but still...) I discovered that Polo/Ralph Lauren was making the kind of clothes that I wore when I was a teenager, before Houstonian impecuniousness. So I resumed trying to look sharp, in a preppy sort of way. I've never been a slob, but I'd gotten a bit too casual.
And I fell in love with a watch, which I never take off except to shower. And I really don't have to take it off then, either, because it's a Hamilton Khaki Navy Automatic, waterproof to depths of two hundred feet. (Or is it meters? I don't need to know!) When I bought it, I didn't know what "automatic" means, and I was dismayed when the watch stopped working a few days after our return from Puerto Rico, where I bought it. Then I figured it out: there has been a name change. When I was growing up, I was given a "self-winding" watch that had been my grandfather's. (I have it still, but the case is broken in such a way that a band can't be attached. I haven't found a jeweler who can be bothered, in other words.) If I thought that "self-winding" was neat, I regard "automatic" as positively virtuous. In our far more fuel-conscious times, an automatic watch seems absolutely green. Even if it didn't, I'd get a kick out of realizing that the watch is being powered by me. Initially, I wore it just to keep it going. Never in my life have I been a man who wears a watch as a matter of course. My watch was always the first thing to come off, even before a necktie, when I came home from work. No longer. That's why I was so tickled, at Thanksgiving in St Croix, to discover, when I was about to take a shower after a walk along the beach, that I'd acquired a most unexpected tan line.
2006 was also the year of reading glasses. The ophthalmologist wrote a prescription, but told me that 1.75 magnification glasses would work just as well, and Barnes & Noble sells Foster Grants for $15.
By the end of the year, you see, the Daily Me came in a somewhat different package.
In other developments, I learned that my birth parents were roughly ten years older when I was born than I'd been told they were, decades ago, by my adoptive father. I'd always known that my birth father would be unlikely to be alive, but that small uncertainty was crushed by the news that he'd actually be about 110. Not impossible, but so improbable as not to be worth thinking about. More problematically, my birth mother went from being 77 to being 86. Where to go from here is a question rendered all the more tantalizing by the discovery that my birth father was the divorced father of three children when I was conceived. Did he even know about me? If he didn't, my half-siblings wouldn't - would they? But I'll have more to say about all of this in coming weeks.
