Birthday Dreams and Dreads

.Passing through another birthday (in August) nowadays is no longer the thrill of opening a new chapter in a beloved book, with dozens more still to come, still to follow at a pace of my own choosing. Birthdays are now like a hike along a twisting, bramble-strewn, almost treacherous path where fellow hikers sometimes fall or give up and walk away. There is always the glory of the view, the sunlit expanse of sky and terrain, the anticipated arrival of a somber, rosaceous sunset. Night and sleep seem preparative.I still experience a pang of disappointment as each birthday comes and goes. All my childhood birthdays were ruined by their timing. Near the end of August, none of my friends, schoolmates or cousins were available to celebrate, to sit around the birthday cake and wish me luck as I took a deep breath, made a desperate impulsive wish, and blew out the candles. There was just my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and sometimes my father. An assembly made dreary simply because they were always there, day in and day out. The specialness of a birthday was draped in black cloth. I didn’t care for presents, never daring to hope for things I knew would never be forthcoming — a foot-pedal car, a Polaroid camera, a chocolate Labrador, a leather attaché case. Instead, I got socks, a book that I had almost always read in the library years before, a wool sweater that made my skin itch, underpants. Birthdays became summarily woeful occasions. But that recurrent disillusion only fueled my longing.Today I love a birthday.Why I wonder.This new birthday joy may have originated when I produced full-out birthdays for my sons. When they were little I orchestrated and devised theme events based on the storybook or movie or video characters they liked. Our spare room was transformed into the interior of a rocket ship or a jungle or a rodeo replete with theme-matched head gear. As they got older we took them out for pizza and a bowling party or a screening of Black Beauty. I can date that dive into childish fantasy as the beginning, the deeply nascent origin of Panzil, the eponymous hero of my forthcoming book series. Writing this children's book brought forth my love of heroic self-discovery, which is the theme of Panzil. I regard that exploration into the who-am-I, the what-am-I, as the core task every child faces from the beginning. From birth on.My own birthdays gradually morphed into a series of increasingly pleasant and even joyous occasions. But the pangs remain. As does the continuing, diminishing countdown..

"Writing this children's book brought forth my love of heroic self-discovery, which is the theme of Panzil."

.Then there is the original birthday. The day of birth.None of us is allowed to remember our own. It’s a neurobiological trick. A device to set memory forward. Earliest memories tend to clock in at age three or four. My earliest memory goes back to age three. I can place it there because it unrolls as I am climbing up the stairs to our flat using both arms and legs as I neared the top. The steps seemed to get higher and steeper as if they were stretching upward. Birth, if I could have remembered it, would have set my life’s clock straight at the beginning. As memory gradually faded in and slowly filled my sense of self it has remained, and always will remain, temporally unmoored. I need to get my original birthday back.It’s like the enduring search for the beginning of time. I think that creation theories and myths partly derive from the search for the memory of birth. None of us wants to know the time of our death. But birth gives us a tracking point. And memory, slow to emerge and forever collapsing into fleet moments—reverberant images and sounds—runs an uneven and unmanageable course. Unable to record our birth we celebrate our birthdays. We count backward. Whenever and wherever available we retrieve documents and photographs and oral testimonies about the time and the event. We slide them into the spaces demarcated by birthday dates. They are the folders into which memories are filed.. And when we create something—from a fold of laundry to a vocalization to a poem—we say that we have given it a birth.Birth is erased by memory. Yet the wish to remember drives us on. The house I was born into and where I lived the first nine years of my life has vanished as if it never existed. The dry cleaner store next door, whose luminescent green lights I could see nightly from my bedroom window, still stands. As if the house, the origin, waits for a new birth.