Today is my sister Joan’s birthday. Like a lot of families, we always telephone each other on birthdays. When I called her this morning the first words out of her mouth were “I was thinking this morning, while I was brushing my teeth, how nice it is that there is at least one day when I get to talk with everyone in the family.”
Because Joan is my younger sister – five and a half years younger – her birthday constitutes one of my first memories of feeling grown-up. You see, my memories of my own early birthdays are rather inchoate and mysterious, coming from somewhere deep within the foggy mists of my personal development, mixed up somewhere in there with my first word and beginning to walk upright. Like something out of Darwin, or perhaps that deleted scene from the beginning of 2001, A Space Odyssey where the Monolith teaches the very first ape how to blow out all the candles.
I was presented with my first candle to blow out long before I had any clear understanding of what “birthday” meant, and I have no memory of that candle, nor the second or third. But there did come a day, I think when I turned five, when I suddenly became aware of The Birthday as a fixture in life, the great Ritual that always was and had always been.
But my sister’s birthday was different. See, by the time she came around I was already in on the action, right from the beginning. I knew what was happening, what it all meant. This time I was playing on the big kids’ team.
I especially remember that for Joan’s second birthday my parents got her a HUGE blue stuffed teddy bear. That bear was to become known, with great affection, as Big Bluie. Only now, as I write this, do I finally realize that this strange name was actually a riff on the name of my Mom’s youngest brother Louie (formally “Louis”, but I have never, even once, heard him referred to by that name). Such are the ways of family ritual.
After a few years Bluie lost first one eye, then the other, and at some point began to look distinctly raggedy. But Joan’s loyalty to her Big Bluie was something fierce. For a while she carried him around with her everywhere, which no doubt contributed to his ocular troubles. It was a great love while it lasted, as early loves go.
When parents introduce their children to the magic of birthdays, I suppose they must think back on their own childhoods, their own unique rituals. It’s like introducing a new generation to The Wizard of Oz, only you get to skip the scary flying monkeys.
In a way a birthday is the great secular religion, isn’t it? It’s the one personal rite of passage that is universally recognized, understood by all races and creeds. Indeed, it is the one occasion in life when, as Woody Allen might have put it, you get to be honored just for showing up.
Maybe that’s why I like birthdays.