They Say It's Your Birthday

Sixty-two years ago today in the back of a three-room camp house in Sloss Hollow, I was born into this world.
Doctor Baker, who lived close enough to our house that you could have knocked his living room window out with a sling shot, bundled up on that gray morning, and walked the few hundred yards to my parent's house and brought me kicking and screaming into the world with a slap.
Some people feel they were born too late, and others too soon, but I feel I was born at precisely the right time.
I was a child of the 50s, and came of age during the turbulent 60s. The vortex of the civil rights movement was in Alabama and one of the turning points was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham which is not 30 miles from where I was born. It's not a time most people here of proud of, but I like to think we learned from it.
I was among some of the last Americans to get drafted into the Army. The year before I was draft eligible, they developed a lottery system. They put all the days of the year into a basket and drew them out one by one. The order in which you were drafted depended on what order your birthday was drawn out of the basket.
The first year my number was so high that I felt emboldened, and instead of trying to get a college deferment, I blew it off and said, "I'm lucky, they'll never draft me."
The next year when I became eligible, my number was something like 17. A few weeks later I got the letter from Uncle Sam in my mailbox. "You've been selected by your friends and neighbors to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States of America."
I never did figure out which of my friends or neighbors ratted me out to Uncle Sam.
At any rate, I made it through the military and after I came home, I hooked back up with my high school sweetheart and we married the next year.
I managed to land a job that paid for my education, and I worked with technology. The company trained me on how to work on computers long before there were computers in everyone pocket.
These days the velocity of change seems to be accelerating at a staggering pace. The more I learn, the further behind I seem to fall.
But I'm sitting here tonight tapping keys on my computer, and when I hit update, people from all over the world will be able to read what's on my mind tonight.
Even though it's only about 10 miles as a crow flies from where I was born, it seems that I'm spending my 62 birthday lightyears from where I started.