This is 60

Tomorrow, apparently, is my lucky day. At long last, I finally get to experience living in my “birth year.”

Born on April 11, 1960, I will turn 60 years old. My age will match the last two digits of the year in which I was born. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Yippee.

I had never heard of this. That is, until my good friend Miriam from Delaware emailed me a New Yorker article from 2007. “Hey, Jinny! Here’s a pertinent piece for your pre-birthday perusal,” she wrote with her usual aplomb and alliteration.

Miriam is a wordsmith and the best copy editor I have ever known. She still makes me pee my pants laughing after 30-some years of friendship. We worked together back when I was a lowly copy editor on the news desk in Wilmington at The News-Journal.

Here’s the New Yorker excerpt, “A Firefighter’s Theorem”:

One Saturday in August, Rhonda Roland Shearer was on her way back from the park with her daughter and two grandsons. They made a stop, as they often do, at the fire station on Sixth and Houston, so that the boys could check out the fire trucks.

Joey Graffagnino showed the kids around the truck while Shearer chatted with another firefighter, Bobby Beddia. “Beddia mentioned that he was very lucky,” Shearer said, “because he was 53, so this year he got to experience living in his ‘birth year.’”

Shearer asked Beddia what he meant. He explained that he was born in 1953 (in September), so his age matched the last two digits of the year in which he was born: a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

A few hours later, Shearer got a call from a friend: A seven-alarm fire had broken out in the vacant Deutsche Bank Building, near Ground Zero, and two firefighters — Graffagnino and Beddia — had been killed.

As a tribute, Shearer decided to continue investigating Beddia’s observation. She called her friend Richard Brandt, a retired NYU physicist. “… What’s sort of great about it is that it will happen to everybody if you live long enough. If you were born in 2000, it happens instantaneously. The people who were born at the end of the century have to take care of themselves,” he said.

The other night at the fire station, some friends of Beddia’s confirmed that he was indeed a numbers guy: He liked poker and golf. When he played roulette, he always played 24, the number of his engine company.”

Guess you never know when your number’s up.

Speaking of time, I’ve got a bookmark from 1982 that I found cleaning out a drawer last week. It’s from the classic comic strip “Shoe,” about a motley crew of newspapermen, all of whom are birds.

Adorned with a knotted piece of green yarn, the bookmark reads:

“This is Nitwitness news break-in!

War, pestilence, greed and total disaster!

Details at 11.”

I hadn’t seen that bookmark in years. How odd that it turned up during the coronavirus pandemic.

What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest.” All that has happened before, the past, leads you to what is happening now, the present. Everything you’ve done has set the stage for the next act, as a prologue does in a play.

In this spring of my third act, COVID-19 trumps, for lack of a better word, my milestone birthday. Or just about anything else, frankly. We’ll see how May goes.

As someone born under the sign of Aries, I am cautiously optimistic about the current state of affairs. But according to everything I’ve read, this will be the worst week yet for our nation during the pandemic.

Some parts of our country will reach what has become known as the dreaded “apex,” the peak for those becoming sick with the COVID-19 disease. Hot spots include New York, Louisiana and Michigan.

The U.S. Surgeon General has called it “… the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.”

Of this I am certain: There’s no reason to doubt that.

And here I was stressing out about turning 60.

Honestly, I’m afraid of this invisible bug. Not so much for myself but for those family and friends closest to me. There are a lot of them.

Mom was right again: “You need younger friends, Jennifer.”

God love her, my dear mother always made sure we had my favorite birthday dessert every year: German chocolate cake. From a box, not a bakery. Nothing but Betty Crocker. (Duncan Hines was too dry, she said.)

I already know I’m getting one this year, too. One pandemic perk is being the still-youthful sacrificial lamb who goes grocery shopping for two weeks’ worth of food. The keeper of the list buys the food. It’s empowering.

And if I die, I’ll go out happy with pecan coconut frosting on my chin.

I’ll think of one wish when I blow out those candles tomorrow:

“I pray we all stay safe … stay well … and stay home.”

Because if we do, then next year is gonna be “60-ONE-derful.”