Well, today is my birthday.

Another year gone by, another year closer to retirement or the grave, depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

I prefer to think myself a realist — I'm just another day closer to both events. Not that it really matters, I see at least one of those as a stark part of anyone's reality. I just hope for retirement. I told somebody the other day that I would like to be put in a pine box under a nice apple tree with a few flowers around.

I was told that I have to have something called a vault, I can't be buried just anywhere and this and that and the other thing.

I tell you, there's more to this dying stuff than you realize. The good thing about dying is that someone else has to worry about it after the fact. That's just one less thing for me to be concerned about these days.

But, on to bigger and brighter thoughts for now. I think my parents are planning to give me a birthday dinner. They know that I don't usually eat foods with sugar in them, so I hope the cake is skipped and we eat a few of my favorite foods instead.

It will be kind of a combination dinner, since Father's Day is just three days after my birthday (today). I guess if I ever have kids I will get the short end of the stick. At least I wasn't born the day before Christmas.

It is as good a reason as any to spend some time with my father, who is getting a few miles on him these days.

We sort of worked out the menu together and I asked for pintos, cornbread, fried cabbage, fresh green onions out of the garden, greens, old-fashioned butter and a few radishes and fresh boiled coffee. It is the kind of food that we both like. It works out pretty well.

I also picked him up a case of Beech Nut chewing tobacco for a present, the white and red kind. There was a time when those little short packs of red and white Lucky Strikes would have been a better gift, but those days have been left behind. I can't say as I mind, stealing those things when I was little was almost enough to kill me, not to mention the beating when I got caught with a pack rolled up in my shirt sleeve.

He bought me some stain and took my boots in for half soles and heel taps. It was a pretty fair trade, I think.

I talked to my father on Sunday for awhile and noticed quite a change in him. I had gotten used to talking pretty loud when I was around him so that he could hear what I was saying. I also tried to talk loud to everyone else so he could hear what I was saying to them, too. I didn't want him to feel like he was being left out of the conversation.

However, someone neglected to tell me that the Veterans' Administration finally got him a new set of hearing aids. The last ones he had were destroyed long ago. He fell asleep in the rocking chair and one of them fell out. When he woke up, he rocked his chair back and heard a resounding crunch. That pretty much ended that hearing aide's useful life.

It took him nigh on a year to get another set. It might have been two, come to think of it.

Sometimes I really get aggravated at the care our veterans get in these hospitals. In my opinion, these men deserve better care than the rest of us, not worse.

Somebody who risked their life for their country should have a better way to go than waiting all day to see some doctor that couldn't get hired on at most upstanding hospitals. Then having to wait for so long to get a hearing aid or something else you really need is just adding insult to injury. But I guess I can get off my soap box.

At any rate, I was talking to him for a little while when I answered a question someone else asked me and forgot to talk loud.

Here I had been talking to him for a good 10 minutes, like he was deaf or something, and he finally asked me, "What were you hollering for?"

This took me by surprise, since I had been communicating with him this way for some time. I can't even remember the last time we talked at a normal volume level. Sometimes my words would get misconstrued in the conversation, too. Sometimes it was funny in a way, like if I said, "I'm glad you got to seem me," preparing to leave. He would sometimes come back with, "Yeah, get me a cup, too." Like he thought I said, "I'm getting a cup of coffee."

Sometimes I think he was just doing it to pick at me. It's hard to tell with him. He likes to joke about as much as I do.

As for those little hearing aids he got, they are the kind that you can't really see at all unless you are pretty close beside him.

My mother said he had a choice between the kind that go all over your ear and the kind that go inside the ear.

"He told them it didn't matter," she said. "I told them he wanted the little ones."

That sounds like my mother, if you asked me. She always was one to speak her mind, no matter who was listening.

He probably didn't really care a whole lot. He got the little ones. He seemed to be pretty happy with them.

I guess you just don't realize how much of the world you miss out on when you can't hear very well. I hope I live long enough to find out. Before he got the hearing aids, I can remember Momma getting pretty aggravated at him, especially after saying the same thing three or four times in a row. She has to do that with me, too, but just because of my apparent attention-deficit disorder. Or so she has told me.

At any rate, my father hears the dog barking out at the garden, the birds singing and the rain coming down outside. Those are all sounds that I usually just take for granted.

However, he also hears the neighbor mowing his yard, loud stereos blasting out ghetto rock and cars with malfunctioning exhaust systems. I guess it is a pretty good trade-off. I don't think I could be happy without hearing the rain fall once in a while. That's one of the best parts of life — or so I have heard.

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