(This week’s post adapted from one previously published in June, 2015)
Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the completion of another year of life, my age increasing as it does each June, reminding me that despite my resistance, learning to gracefully accept the aging process is unavoidable. I look forward to birthdays as my grandchildren do. My youngest granddaughter, whose birthday is three weeks away, talks of little else now but the plans for her party in July. I remember being like that a long time ago, recalling the just-turned-six little girl, blonde hair in ringlets, carefully prepared by my mother and topped with a giant hair ribbon. In the photograph of that day in June, a picnic table is piled with gaily wrapped gifts and a chocolate layer cake sits in the center, six candles aflame. My face, lit by the candlelight, bears an ear-to-ear grin. Just as my granddaughter does now, I eagerly counted the days until my next birthday, becoming a “big” girl, each year promising many more possibilities than the one before. I was ready and impatient to be an older age.
Not so much now. I tell myself it’s best to stop counting. The smile on my face, when someone says “Happy Birthday!” may well be tinged with something other than enthusiasm. I’ve resisted accepting the category of “senior citizen.” But I remember a birthday three years ago, when my husband planned an early birthday dinner so we could attend a jazz event afterward, I protested. “What? It’s too early. No one eats that early except…” My voice trailed off before I could say “senior citizens.” He was doing his best to orchestrate a celebratory evening, but it felt a little like a “blue plate special,” the early dinners aimed at the elder customers, because as we walked into the restaurant at 5:25 p.m., it was empty. We were first to be seated; first to be served; first to leave. It lacked the feel of “celebration,” because it reminded both of us of the relentless march toward old age.
Are we ever ready for the changes life presents to us? It’s never either/or. Each stage of life has its challenges as well as its rewards. I’m quite content to be called “Gramma,” but on the other hand, I am less enthusiastic the relentless pull of gravity, loss of muscle tone, and graying of my hair. I now have regular visits to my cardiologist, reminding me of a condition I once thought belonged only to elders like my grandparents. I’ve been humbled and learned that while illness or heart conditions can happen at any age, 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…
Every birthday reminds me of others 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. I’ll watch as my youngest granddaughter makes her wish and blows out the seven candles on her cake in a few weeks. And she, like me, will hear that same song many years from now and remember the delights of birthdays from her childhood.
There’s an exercise I’ve borrowed from Roger Rosenblatt’s wise little book, Unless It Moves the Human Heart (Harper Collins, 2011). It’s a delightful read and a glimpse into his “Writing Everything” class. It’s an exercise that began with Rosenblatt asking if anyone in his class had recently celebrated—or was about to–a birthday. Several students raised their hands of course, and Rosenblatt describes what happened next:
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 exercise out with one of my writing groups a few years ago. They looked at me with curiosity as I began singing and 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, mind flooded with memories of birthdays past: 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.” (It helped, I suppose, that my aunt was the “society” editor!)
What happened in my writing group was that everyone had a host of memories associated with the birthday song, as many writers have. In fact, 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 used birthdays as a time for retrospection. I’m especially fond of Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday,” a short poem that captures the introspection triggered by one’s birthday:
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, particularly as we age, inspire our reflection on 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.
Tomorrow, I’ll make a list for myself, remembering years past, the birthday memories that linger in my mind, and I know I’ll have enough material for several days of writing, if not more. It’s a chance to look back, reflect on life’s lessons, its joys and sorrows, and to consider what I intend for the coming year. Birthdays. Anniversaries. They’re chock full of memories, markers of the passage of time, experiences, people–the stuff of life–the stories of who we were, who we are, how life and the weather have treated us. If any of you are also celebrating a birthday in the coming days, “happy birthday” to you too.
Writing Suggestion:
Hum the tune, or if you’re feeling brave, sing it: “Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you…” List the memories, good or bad, that 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 of a birthday or anniversary lurks a story or a poem. Why not write one?
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