Zero

Have you ever wondered why zero years are so important in our culture?

We celebrate or dread turning 60 or 50 or even 30. Why is that? As my wife points out each year, on your birthday you are only a day older than you were the day before your birthday. Yet the zero years seem to have great significance.

A co-worker turned 30 last month and was depressed about it for months leading up to that day. Another colleague of mine will celebrate her 40th birthday this summer and she no longer says much about it; she mentioned it a lot when we first met two years ago.

Four or five co-workers who turned 50 during the past few years were happy to acknowledge their birthday but refused to say the number. I felt the same way on my 50th. In fact, on my 50th I had braces on my teeth like a high school kid. No one would have believed it was my 50th birthday.

Walk through a Hallmark store and you’ll see several cards for decade birthdays like 50 or 30, but good luck finding a year-specific card for someone turning 53 or 27.

The 100th anniversary of powered human flight was celebrated in Kitty Hawk, NC with a week-long party in December 2003. A hat from that event inspired this post ...



Next December is the 105th anniversary; who cares? That town might see a couple hundred extra tourists, but that’s it.

In 1976 our country celebrated its 200th birthday. We’ll be 232 next July. Ho hum.

Remember when 1999 became the year 2000? More zeros led to more attention. There were waves of optimism about a new century as well as fears that older computer systems using 99 as the year designation would fail to understand that 00 represented the next year not the previous century. What was on TV as 2008 began? Hanna Montana.

I’m tempted to say that our fascination with zeros has something to do with the metric system, in which everything is divisible by 10. However, while most of the rest of the world measures in liters, meters, centimeters and kilometers, the U.S. counts gallons, yards, inches and miles.

So if you are turning 60, 50, 40, 30 or 20 this year, happy birthday. If you’re 48 on your next birthday, uhh, call me in two years. My birthday was last week, on a day with a zero in it, but I had to really think about the year. No zero … just fifty-something again.