Worst.Birthday.Ever?
Narrator's voice: It was not.
I love my birthday. I don’t necessarily love what I look like in photographs these days, but I am grateful that I am aging, so far, in a way that allows me to stride through my days at my usual breakneck pace.1 “Love your face,” a Very Famous Person2 recently replied to an email in which I double-downed on my commitment to eschew all cosmetic intervention.
So I love my face and I love my birthday. My birthday, MY BIRTH.DAY, a day I technically share with a big swath of the public, but I plant my flag and declare it MY day. Mine, mine, mine. I’m not crass enough to stretch it across a week, but if it falls on a weekend, as it did this year, I might make a two-day event out of it.
I had big plans for my most recent birthday, my 66th. My daughter and I traveled to New York City, which I hadn’t visited since July.3 We had theater tickets, brunch, lunch, and dinner reservations, plans with friends. But my daughter developed a virulent virus five days before the trip. She asked me not to cancel — “I’ll want to go to New York when I’m on my deathbed4” — so we went.
She left our lodgings exactly once, for a short walk to a Housing Works thrift shop where we found a $200 Diptyque candle on sale for $30. I do not understand the concept of a $30 candle, much less a $200 candle, but it made her happy, so I bought it. Happy birthday to me and my candle-less cake, but at least I had the foresight to pre-order one from Milk Bar.
The thing is, I’m pretty sure — hopeful? — I’ve already had my worst birthday ever and it will be hard to dethrone that particular champion. It was so bad I even wrote a poem about it, an abecedarian5 titled “An Aquarian in Paris,” which I have forced a few unlucky souls to read and a few more to hear. I don’t want to taunt the universe into topping itself, as it were, but I’m hopeful that I’ll never have a worse birthday than that one. So far, so good, knock wood.
“I always want to celebrate my birthday with you,” I told my daughter while we huddled together and watched the latest episode of Elsbeth. At that moment, we still nurtured a wan hope that we might manage to do some of the things we planned. Nope, it wasn’t to be.
A bummer, but a very small, lower-case b, privileged kind of bummer in the scheme of things. Our existential rights weren’t threatened — we weren’t facing deportation or being deprived of hormones/medical care we need, to cite just two very real examples from our current hellscape. I told my daughter that while I don’t agree with a lot of what Brene Brown says, I do believe there is no point in catastrophizing. I hope for the best and when I’m wrong, I’m disappointed, but I never regret having been hopeful. The way I see it, being hopeful reduces the number of hours one spends being miserable.
I was eager to have a fabulous birthday this year because it would be my first birthday without my mom. On my 65th birthday, I took her to an outstanding French bistro in Baltimore, the same bistro where two characters share a meal at the end of Murder Takes a Vacation.6 The book was far from finished, although I had no inkling of that in the moment, could not foresee how much work I still had to do. There was so much I couldn’t foresee. My mom and I would have another birthday celebration in April, when she turned 93 and my sister turned 68, a rather lackluster lunch that we tried hard to pretend was better than it was. Did my mom and I share a meal after that? I honestly don’t recall. Maybe Mother’s Day? By September she was dead.
Over my lost birthday weekend, I yearned to “treat” myself — Internet shopping anyone? — but I didn’t actually want anything. I just felt compelled to do something, anything that felt celebratory. Yet when it became clear that we were going to miss every planned event, I relaxed, felt all my anxiety ebb away. The point wasn’t doing things, the point was being with my daughter. My only disappointment was that I couldn’t wave a magic wand and rid her of her terrible virus. (Almost gone now, ten days later.) We resolved to attempt a birthday do-over later this year.
On the night I turned 66, I cuddled with my daughter on the sofa and said, no, this birthday wasn’t great, but it was memorable. I confessed I couldn’t actually remember my birthdays from 2022 and 2023 — although I assume both featured grocery store cakes, which I adore — but I’d never forget this one. I told her an abridged version of the Worst Birthday Ever, ending: “tl;dr, this isn’t close to the worst birthday ever.”
She then asked me to explained what “tl;dr” means.
Tl;dr: Man plans, God laughs, even if you don’t believe in God.
Read/reading: The Note, Alafair Burke (Amazing!) ; Eldorado Road (Brilliant!), Megan Abbott; The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara; London Rules, Joe Country, Mick Herron (audio). Slough House, Mick Herron.7 Three hundred pages of student work for Writers in Paradise.
Rereading: How Firm a Foundation, Patrick Dennis. Campus Melody, Anne Emery.
Me, me, me: Oh, god, there’s so much me in this that I should be a Schedule II Controlled Substance. But I would like to add here, for those who are still reading: My students at Writers in Paradise this year were grand.
According to my phone, my average walking speed on the day I wrote this was 4.3 miles an hour.
You know what’s more annoying than name-dropping? Coy, implicit name-dropping.
One day, I plan to retire in New York, because it’s a great place to be an old lady, especially an old lady who doesn’t want to own a car, but likes to walk very fast.
Kind of funny, because she had been there just two weeks previously and may even have contracted her virus there.
I’m fancy.
More about my love for Herron’s books in next month’s newsletter.
The celebration isn't over until Aquarius season ends, so you have another couple weeks. My friend ordered me that same Milkbar cake for my 50th and that was so decadent and good. Happy birthday from a fellow Aquarian Marylander!
Happy belated birthday!! Respectfully, you are a total babe.