HAVE A HAPPY BIRTHDAY
My birthday, falling near the end of summer, was ruined throughout my childhood. I thought it was because none of my young peers were around, either away at summer camp or at their parents’ lakeside cottage, or, like me, languishing under summer doldrums.
As time passes, speeding up as age slows us down, my birthday, like that of many others, came to accrue a panoply of signification and resonances. I have become increasingly aware that another birthday will begin emerging as the months peel by like the pages of a fast-forwarding movie calendar. Of course the birthday is marked with its age, a tattered valentine no one really wants to receive.
Why celebrate that date? Many ignore it as if to wish it away, perhaps deny that aging is taking place and has an assigned number, a temporal tape measure slowly but inevitably unreeling. But celebration can bring in the conviviality of family and friends. Any acknowledgment comes in the color of cheer, with good wishes and affection tied on.
Indeed, birthdays are tied to us like an appendage that drags along beside us, collecting the detritus of our lives, stuff we did or experienced or failed to follow, accumulating and sometimes falling aside as if forgotten only to charge up when least expected and surely unwanted.
So birthdays put on weight. Heaving that charge can seem a burden or a privilege and that adjective may also shift around. Birthdays become storehouses of memories because they are assigned a memorial role in our lives. They are like our book of deeds, done and not done, good and not so good.
Birthdays of the great, the remembered cultural and historic giants, are remembered and honored as totemic moments in our social, public life. The birthday recalls the life and the accomplishments and also marks the passage of time between that life and the later present. We even designate public holidays to commemorate that life on the birthdate.
We are particularly drawn to honor the birthdays of our family members and our friends, at least the close ones. And we may privately honor the birthday of deceased family and friends, keeping them as private totemic rituals.
Much as birthday recognition seems commonplace in middle-class America today, it was not always so. Except for the birthdays of national leaders, birthdays of everyone else were not celebrated or honored until the mid-nineteenth century. As children began to emerge as fond members of the family rather than as little people and as individualism became rooted in the social milieux, the attention to the birthday of children may have begun the social tradition of celebrating their birthday. Presumably, that pattern became collective memories that extended into later and later ages.
However, old people seem the least likely to fete themselves or even to respond to the celebratory efforts of others, family or friends. Indeed, reminders of their age may be, if not unwelcome, perhaps seemingly frivolous. In advancing age, a birthday party might be regarded as an anachronism.
Birthday cards presumably arose as an industry in response to the gaiety associated with birthday celebration. And as birthdays became popular and formalized, the birthday cake emerged as a key centerpiece. Immediately follow are the candles and their lighting, an ancient ceremonial rite. There is also the giving of gifts. And the song, Happy Birthday, comes down to us from the Hill sisters in the 1890s. Between the Happy Birthday serenade and the lighting of the candles is the make-a-wish ritual. And that moment, certainly as a child, represents an act of magic or just magical thinking. Making a wish is a gesture like waving a wand. A child’s eyes and ears capture that incantation. At least mine did. And the possibility of wish fulfillment sticks to me even as I age beyond belief in it.
The birthday party is, if not a rite de passage, a rite of message. Like a letter in a bottle tossed into the sea. There to drift endlessly, or to be found, read, and followed through.
Birthdays, counted, remembered, dismissed, esteemed, beloved, or disdained—birthdays are perhaps the most inevitable day and the most certainly perpetual moment in any one’s life.
Happy Birthday, Murray.
