Someone had another birthday yesterday, not that someone ever counted them much or found cause to celebrate–after the age of twelve. It was a date someone tried his best to keep to himself most of his life, though a few greeting cards and phone calls inevitably found their way to him precisely on the twenty-third of August each year.

Records will show, however, someone grew fond of overstating or understating his age, whenever he was asked or a blank space required to be filled in. A man for all ages…all seasons. But given the yap and reach these days of the world-wide-web/word, what’s a man of a certain age to do to protect all the evidence of time passing? Doppelganger, third man, undercover agent…the less anyone knows the better. Even he couldn’t remember at times how old he was. “I’m not sure,” he replied. Which seemed embarrassing—but never to him. He just never paid attention. Identity was always too revealing. Give him silence. Mystery!

Someone, however, pauses today to give thanks to all those who found him out this August…traced the whereabouts of his years, the signs of his time, with so many good thoughts and greetings.

And someone is particularly grateful for the small poem below, penned by an online, writer/haiku poet friend, Curtis Dunlap, who caches all the mystery, beauty, feeling of someone’s diminishing time upon the earth in so few but wondrous words:

late summer breeze —
the warmth
of one more candle

Curtis Dunlap, tobacco road poet