A Lineup of Sevens

Exactly 77 years ago today, on the 27th day of the 7th month, I emerged into a world gripped by 1931's settling in of the Great Depression, and into a scene that in many other ways as well was considerably different from the warm, floating security of my mother's body.

It happened on a Monday. The endlessly sweet receptionist/peripheral vision examiner at the eye doctor's made sure to tell me that, because her birthday happens to fall just a few days earlier.

Of course it's easy to find something significant about each of our latest birthdays, but of the many I've had, I was especially looking forward to this one because of that heavy lineup of the sevens, as I long ago had come to regard "7" as being the most elegant, attractive, noble, and mysterious of the numbers. Naturally it also helped that that number is so heavily a part of my personal information.

A few weeks ago the wood-fired pottery family across the road threw a party for K.'s apprentice lady, whose three years of working under his extremely able guidance were over. While sitting next to me at a picnic table, with several others listening, L., K.'s wife, won a bet with me by revealing that she did indeed know just when my next birthday would be and the age I would reach

In response I couldn't help launching my little rapture about that lineup of sevens.

But then L. informed me that her mother, who had just passed on, had been 77, and next a guy across the table said that his mother's health, after a lifetime of being perfect, suddenly dropped precipitately when one day, at age 77, while carrying too much luggage, she had a fall in an airport.

Behind that, suddenly it no longer seemed so cool to be 77, and of course, in the actual scheme of things, that number is really no more significant than any other.

But those misgivings didn't last long, and now that it has actually come to pass, I am happier than ever to have reached that particular confluence of numbers.