This is my 5th year celebration of Bigfoot’s Birthday. FIVE YEARS. It seems like just yesterday that my beautiful, charming friends and I were huddled around a booth in our college bar celebrating together over cheap beer and wine. We raised our glasses to Bigfoot. Was he real? Who were we to judge? Here was a fuzzy, furry potential mythical creature worthy of our devotion, attention and praise.  

Bigfoot’s Birthday Celebration 

One of the wonderful ladies I celebrated with, back in 2012, found her own Bigfoot this year. I don’t know if she ever gave up hope or stopped celebrating Bigfoot’s birthday but I hope not. And now, she radiates love and faith in her own furry man. I couldn’t be happier as she navigates the wild forest of Pittsburgh.

I honor Bigfoot because I secretly romanticize a belief in the unknown. As children, we naturally gravitate toward the fantastic. Fairies in the woods. Monsters under the bed. The incredible and the possible was always within our reach. Those ideas seem harder to come by with age. The world instills doubt in our minds and with the loss of innocence, we lose the ability to dream. With each passing year or misstep or heartbreak, we wonder if a certain person, or thing or opportunity is out there at all.  

So to you, I say:

Long live Bigfoot, a creature no less elusive or incredible than the complex emotion of love that so many humans seem to obsess over on February the 14th. 

 

I found this New Yorker cartoon in Barnes & Nobles a couple weeks ago while I was looking for birthday cards. I immediately bought it. For myself. I don’t see any shame in giving yourself greetings cards and may continue to do so, every year on this special day. I couldn’t possibly address a card to Bigfoot himself.

Bigfoot
c/o The Forest Dwellers
Somewhere quiet with occasional human sightings
USA

So raise your glasses high!!!! Eat one too many chocolate-covered somethings and laugh loudly in a crazed roar, symbolic of the big man himself. Happy Birthday Bigfoot. This day is for you.