Next week is the birthday of a dear friend. He looks pretty good for his age. He’ll be turning 189. Which makes him almost as old as Keith Richards.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, 1835, late November. It was colder than a witch’s underwire.

His mother was not expecting him. She wasn’t even close to being ready, so she tried to squeeze him back in. But it didn’t work. And now we have “Huckleberry Finn.”

During childlabor, Halley’s comet was passing overhead. The comet frightened a lot of rural people, causing many to either pray in tongues or drink whiskey. Sam says that his mother did both during childbirth.

Sam was a lot of trouble as a kid. He was sickly. Nobody thought he’d make it past infancy. Being born premature in 1830s was no cakewalk. He was tiny. His complexion was pale.

“When I first saw him,” his mother recalled, “I could see no promise in him.”

But he was smart. And talented. And he could lie incredibly well. The kid was such a good liar he received annual Christmas cards from Satan.

He got in trouble a lot. The best humans always do. He started smoking in elementary school. He skipped class so often his teachers sent flowers to his mother and asked when the funeral was.

He grew up in Hannibal. He spent his idle hours beside the Mississippi, catching catfish, sleeping in the sun, or making up stories. Although his highest aspiration was not to be a writer.

“When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.”

He apprenticed as a pilot at age 22. He became a steamboat captain. He learned every twist and bend of Old Man River. Every submerged log. Every snag, sandbar, and most importantly, where the best liquor could be purchased.

“Too much of anything is bad,” he once wrote. “But too much good whiskey is barely enough.”

I first met Sam when I was a kid. I was a dropout. I had ugly red hair. Freckles. I was chubby.

During this period, I stumbled upon “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” America’s greatest celebration of boyhood. It changed my life.

Throughout my adulthood, I would consult his books over and again. I found myself memorizing his words. And when I finally decided to complete my high-school equivalency as a grown man, I would attend night school and read “Innocents Abroad,” or “Life on the Mississippi” between classes.

After I graduated, I traveled to visit Sam’s birthplace and childhood home. I paid overpriced fees to be entertained on a riverboat by a Samuel Clemens impersonator in a white wig who also performed the second half of his show as a Michael Jackson impersonator.

But it didn’t matter. I was in my hero’s hometown. I was walking his streets. Breathing his air.

As a young man, it was Sam who would motivate me to start work on my first novel. I would eventually become a writer myself. Although not a good one, as you have already figured out. It was Sam who changed the tidal current of my life.

I owe a lot to Sam. And I suppose I just wanted the entire internet to wish my dear friend a happy birthday.

If not the entire internet, maybe at least Keith Richards could say a few words.