Everyday at the end of the morning announcements in elementary school they played “The Birthday Song” by the Beatles and announced the birthdays for the day. For a brief moment, if your name was announced, you felt like a mini-celebrity. Or so I imagine. The shy kids blushed, the charming smirked, the clowns and confident ones stood up and took a bow or flexed their muscles. Having a summer birthday, I never got to hear my name called out. I also never got to bring in the ritualistic box of munchkins or cupcakes for the class. Perhaps had we been more organized, us summer birthday kids would have formed a union of sorts, maybe demanded fair treatment and better munchkin wages, or formed a secret club that shunned all the school-year birthday kids – the secret summer birthday society. Summer birthdays unite. Trying to think back, I’m guessing it would have been a small club – all of my friends from that time have school-year birthdays.
Today I turn 46. Sometime after turning 30, I sorta lost track of my age. I’ve heard other people say the same thing happened to them – a strange type of amnesia. If asked, I usually get it right, but I sometimes have to do the math. I figure it’s not long before I’m counting on my fingers again.. Sometimes when asked, I have a moment of uncertainty. I’m always within a year, but I pause.
Birthdays were not a big thing in my family. I know one year I had a party at an ice cream shop. We played pin the tail on the donkey and I think I got a banana split. For the longest time I wanted a pinata. I got one, it was a donkey. We didn’t hang it and break it open, I kept it intact and treated it like the rest of my stuffed animals. I believe one year we had some of the neighborhood kids over to the house for a some cake. I think that was the night the newspaper boy showed up to collect, and one of the older kids, Steve, called him a nigger. My father kicked him out of the house. That might not have been on my birthday, but I feel like we were at the table having cake.
Now, of course, birthdays are celebrated mostly through posts to your Facebook page. I can be pretty bad at wishing other people a happy birthday, so I don’t expect much in return. Or maybe I don’t expect much and therefore I’m bad about wishing other people…. I don’t know, there’s something that feels forced about the whole thing. I get caught in an all or nothing debate in my head. I don’t feel right wishing some people a happy birthday while skipping others. That’s one of many problems with Facebook – everybody is listed as a friend, and well… very few of my friends are actual friends. I don’t want to wish everyone a happy birthday, and yet I feel like everybody is watching and keeping score. Nevertheless, I’ll get a handful of posts, which are deeply appreciated. My fifth grade teacher is really good about posting on all of our pages. He’s the best.
Last year, I had really hoped that my ex-fiancee would reach out to wish me a happy birthday – if nothing else to show that she still thought of me once in a while. She didn’t. I have no such misgivings this year. I suppose it’s the difference between wanting something and welcoming something.
I don’t have any plans for the day. I don’t think either of my friends here in Memphis know it’s my birthday. Which is just as well, it’s supposed to rain later so we wouldn’t be able to do much. I might pass some time writing. I might also spend some time thinking about this strange think that is age. There was a time in life when being 40 seemed like it was something older people did – it wasn’t something I could imagine. Now as I make my way towards 50, I’m probably spending more time looking back than I am forward. I spend some time looking around and asking if this is where I’m supposed to be, even though I generally reject such questions because they bring unhelpful comparisons. I’m also going to try to smile more today. I was on my long walk this morning, my phone was pinging with a few text messages and birthday wishes. It made me smile, and I thought that’s how I’d like to walk through life – or at least today: smiling.