Writing Through Cancer

(This week’s post drawn from material originally published September 22, 2013 and June 10, 2012)

I celebrated another year of life this past Friday, reminding me that despite my resistance, advancing age is unavoidable.  I alternated between thinking I’d ignore the day altogether, yet peering in the mailbox to see there were any envelopes, greeting card size, with my name and address carefully written on each.  There were, but I had to laugh at myself.  Birthdays bring up the memories of that just-turned-six little girl I was so long ago, the one I see now in an old photograph.  Blonde hair curled for the occasion and topped with a giant hair ribbon.  The picnic table piled with gaily wrapped gifts and a chocolate cake in the center, six candles aflame.  My child’s face, lit by the candlelight, bears an ear-to-ear grin.  Those were the years when I eagerly counted the days until my next birthday, becoming a “big” girl with each year promising many more possibilities than the one before.  I was ready then, even impatient, to claim an older age.

Not now.  I swear I’m going to stop counting.  The smile I wear, although pleased, as friends and family wish me a “Happy Birthday!” is tinged with something other than just enthusiasm.  I’ve resisted joining the category of “senior citizen.”  When I discovered that my husband planned an early birthday dinner on Friday evening so we could attend a jazz event afterward, one that began at 7:30, I protested.  “What?  It’s too early.  No one eats that early except…”  My voice trailed off.  Why complain?  He was doing his best to orchestrate a celebratory evening.  Yet as we walked into the restaurant at 5:25 p.m., it was empty.  We were the first  seated; the first served; the first to leave, reminding me of that slow, but relentless march toward older age, year after year, and life changing.

Are we ever ready for the changes life presents to us?  It’s never either/or.  Each stage has challenges, but there are rewards too.  I’m quite content to embrace the title, “Gramma,” for example,  but on the other hand, I am less enthusiastic about my physical changes—the relentless pull of gravity, loss of muscle tone, and the silvering of my hair.  I balk at regular visits to my cardiologist, reminding me of a condition I once thought belonged only others, elder others like my grandparents.  Ready or not, you can’t escape aging.

“Ready,” the title of a poem by Irene MacKinney, begins with a memory:

I remember a Sunday with the smell of food drifting
out the door of the cavernous kitchen and my serious
teenage sister and her girlfriends Jean and Marybelle
standing on the bank above the dirt road in their
white sandals ready to walk to the country church
a mile away, and ready to return to the fried
chicken, green beans and ham, and fresh bread
spread on the table…

Memories.  Every single birthday reminds me of others long past.  Memories come alive:  the scent of chocolate as my mother baked my birthday cake, the candle flames dancing as everyone sang to me, eyes shut, wishing as hard as I could for something I wanted to happen.  In a role reversal that made me smile, Flora, one of my four-year old granddaughters, belted out “Happy Birthday” over the telephone.  She sang with all the enthusiasm of a youngster who revels in celebrations, parties and birthdays.  She will, many years from now, hear that same song and as I do, remember the delights of her birthdays from much younger times.

There’s an exercise in Roger Rosenblatt’s wise little book, Unless It Moves the Human Heart (Harper Collins, 2011), a glimpse into his “Writing Everything” class, I’ve used in my writing groups, always with great results.  It began with Rosenblatt asking if anyone in his class had recently celebrated—or was about to–a birthday.

I…then burst into song:  “Happy Birthday to You.”  They [his students] give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years.  I sing it again.  “Happy Birthday to You.  Anyone had a birthday recently?  Anyone about to have one?” …just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives” (pp.39-40).

I tried the same exercise with one of my writing groups.  They looked at me with curiosity as I began singing, laughing a little before joining in.  “Now write,” I said as the song ended.  “What memories does that tune inspire?”  I wrote with the group too, my mind flooded with recollections of other birthdays: the blue bicycle waiting for me the morning of my sixth birthday, the surprise party my husband and daughters managed to pull off few years ago, the headline in my small town newspaper’s society page:  “Sharon Ann Bray turns six today.”  (Never mind that my aunt was the society editor!)

What happened in the group, of course, was that everyone had a host of memories associated with the birthday song—like so many writers.  Rosenblatt isn’t the only writer who used birthdays for inspiration.  Go to www.poets.org and you’ll discover William Blake, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and many others inspired by birthdays, like Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday,” a short poem that captures the introspection another year can bring:

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Poems about birthdays reflect the passage of time, aging, even the opportunity for change, for example, Joyce Sutphen’s “Crossroads:”

The second half of my life will be black 

to the white rind of the old and fading moon. 
The second half of my life will be water 
over the cracked floor of these desert years.

So try it.  Hum the tune, or if you’re feeling brave, sing it:  “Happy Birthday to you.  Happy Birthday to you…”  Then take stock of the memories, good or bad, this traditional birthday ditty evokes  Whether you’ll soon have  a birthday, recently celebrated one, or joined in the birthday celebrations of family and friends, explore your memories of birthdays past as a way to inspire your writing.  In each memory lurks a story or a poem…   Write one.