A Blues-ish Birthday

Oh, I am glad October 4th and 5th are over.

My birthday is October 4th, and frankly, I’m just glad the pressure that something might happen is over, and then the questions about my birthday are over. It was just a non-event, that’s all.

Don’t worry about me—I am not some sad clown crying in the corner acting any more needy than usual. It’s just an interesting thing, the birthday thing, to figure out and reflect upon, but rest assured I am not one of those middle-aged (gasp! did that happen??) Bah, humbug haters-of-birthdays. Actually I love the whole birthday thing. It’s just that this year, it was a non-starter.

The day began with a royal court decree that each student must arrive early to morning meeting for swine flu testing. I was busy monitoring attendance of my senior class outside of the auditorium while someone (I never learned who!) announced inside the auditorium that it was my birthday. Evidently they sang. But I wasn’t there. And if you have ever heard the KA student body sing Happy Birthday, well, it is a sad dirge indeed. And that pretty much sums up the birthday!

Anyway, after school I was sitting and visiting with some of the juniors I enjoy so much, and somehow the conversation turned to food. Zack, this great Jordanian-American who grew up in Knoxville, and I started swooning over southern BBQ. I told them of my great trip to Mississippi in 2000 and that one of my goals on that trip was to have BBQ every day of the trip, and when the sauce was dripping down my hands and arms, I had reached BBQ Nirvana. Ahhhh, Zack and I competed over which of us loves BBQ the most.

I smacked my lips in the memory of the great Mi’sippi BBQ meals and when I came in my apartment I went to the CD file and looked up a CD I had bought on that trip at the Blues Museum in Greenwood, Mississippi. Somehow the moment seemed appropriate to play the blues. Again, this is not some clichéd scene where I drew the curtains and moaned a little “I’ve gotta right to sing the blues.” I just wanted to kill some time until I could make some calls to the USA and enjoy some birthday greetings from friends and family.

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me that she would be passing through Jordan on October 4, and why not get together. Since no one else had made any plans, I thought it was fine, and I did say how good it would be to see her again, and that, hey, it was even my birthday! Good, good, plans set. I like that.

Well, during my impromptu blues session and trip down Mississippi memory lane, I got a text wondering if I wanted to meet her later that night since she had other plans now. Oh, I guess she forgot our plans. She wondered if maybe later I would want to join her with another friend. Well, that didn’t quite sound like a birthday celebration, and I had loaned out my car, so it just seemed like the history of the blues might be my vehicle of choice. And actually, on another birthday I had a Blues-ish day. My 21st birthday, celebrated when I was doing a program in Chicago, was spent in a Blues Club in Chicago. That’s right. I saw Koko Taylor, the so-called, “Queen of the Blues” playing in a club somewhere in Chi-town. That’s right, I had a little history with the Blues on my birthday…

I went over to the Dining Hall, but saw the normal chicken and rice offering (it’s fine, it’s just, you know, soooooooo normal!) and sighed. Let’s just go back and spend some time on the phone.

Okay, this is the thing about birthdays: it is a narcissistic day, and you need someone really important and special in your life, especially for those of us unmarried, to seize that opportunity and make those plans for you!

I thought about my birthdays in Jordan, since this is birthday #3 here. In the first year, when we had been here only about 10 weeks, it was a warm surprise when a student of mine gave me a note hoping I had a good birthday. I keep this note in my bedside drawer, and she said she knew I was likely to be sad that day since I was far from my family, and she hoped that our KA family would be a new family. It was a kind and thoughtful gesture. And my new friend Elizabeth organized a birthday dinner out to Amman for burgers at Fuddrucker’s. This was still when getting off campus was a rare and marvelous treat, and about 14 of us piled into a large booth at the restaurant, all new friends in this new country.

Last year my birthday fell during the Eid holiday so school was not in session, but my father was here, and since we had not spent my birthday together in 20 years, that birthday last year was also a rare and marvelous treat.

But the birthday is also when I miss, you know, the other life, the most.

So Sunday was a perfectly fine and normal day. But there is a little pressure for a grand celebration, and what do you say when people ask, “So what are you doing exciting for your birthday?” Oh, I plan to write an incredibly exciting lecture about the Golden Age of Athens. That is what I did, but you kinda want a little more.

I spent a couple hours calling friends and family. Usually one waits for the birthday calls, but hey, the Vonage line was open, and our phone lines are not the most reliable anyway. So if a line is open—make a call! I chatted with my family while they were at lunch at LaRosa’s after church, just like 90% of the Sunday noontime meals in our family. I laughed with Emma and Jack, spoke with our 92-year old friend Edna, and asked my father what the first conversation was like when he and my mother held me on that longago October 4th. I called a few more dear friends—all of them saying, “I planned to call you later!”

I went back to the lectures on Classical Athens and I remembered the Birthday of the Incredibly Mysterious Present.

Sometime around my 11th birthday a sumptuously wrapped present appeared in our living room, maybe a week before October 4th. It was the largest box I had ever seen. And it was for me! On October 4th! What a great build-up to see this wrapped box every day as I practiced the piano, went out to play, passed by on the way to school. What enormous present was I going to get???? What incredible change in my life was I about to enjoy?? The anticipation was unbelievable and exciting.

October 4th came (my mother liked to wake me up in those days exactly at the time of my birth, something around 5:00 A.M., to christen the new year!) and finally I got to open the present.

It was a pillow.

A pillow? It was a huge pillow, but that was it. A perfectly fine, ordinary pillow. Nothing else! Nothing more extraordinary. It was difficult to mask my disappointment. I’m sure I got other gifts that year, but I couldn’t tell you what they were. I just remember the deflation over the pillow.

So, yeah, Birthday 2009 was just a pillow.

In the evening the vonage line was busy, so no more calls. As bedtime approached I looked back on some of the non-pillow birthdays. I remembered senior year at Denison when college friend Steve found a gelato place about 25 miles away, and we went with our magnificent clique and enjoyed the Italian gelato I had learned about while studying abroad. I remembered the birthday nights in the last 12 years spent at a Broadway show, or hearing the divine Barbara Cook at the swanky Café Carlyle, or dinners at “the club” enjoying the intimacy of treasured friends. I remembered surprise parties for birthdays #16 and #18, I remembered the swim birthday parties at the YMCA and the McDonald-land birthday cakes. I remembered birthdays with play casts after a long rehearsal.

So as I checked on-line for my first-ever Birthday-on-Facebook I enjoyed the greetings of about 50 friends—people ranging from nearly long-lost childhood friends to my newest colleagues here at KA. I floated off to sleep, glad that the day was ending, but comforted by such great memories.

Again, it wasn’t a day for pining, just wanting a little more of something…and then the following day when some people asked, “So, what did you do??” and I tried to change the subject to a less vulnerable topic. So October 4th and 5th ended. Regular life could resume without the pressure and potential letdown of a New-Year’s-Eve-like day.

This morning, freed of the birthday manacles, I noticed a card in my box. Most people have given up trying to outguess the snail mail from the USA to Jordan (since in Jordan the mail may literally be carried by snails, or at least apathetic camels) so mail is rare. But there was a card from a family that is among my most treasured. The card read:

To live with purpose,
To say the courageous thing,
To celebrate the simple gift,
to follow your dreams,
This is a happy life.--Wayland Henry

October 4th wasn’t unhappy, just a little, you know, too regular. But I celebrated this card today, this simple gift, which has come with a deep and marvelous friendship, and I thought about where I am, who I know, what I get to do, and a little birthday reconciliation filled my soul.