I’M WRITING this on the day before my birthday, eeking the last few hours out of an age that this time last year seemed positively ancient and to which I am now suddenly, desperately attached.
The time has come when the flip of a calendar date brings with it too many candles to fit on your average birthday cake. Thus, the candles become representative and the number they represent is one you once associated with your parents’ generation.
Despite which, my love for birthdays still manages to trump my lamentably predictable thirty-something ennui. It’s not just my ow7n I’m talking about, but any birthday at all. Your birthday, even; the anniversary of your opening your gummy eyes to the world; the one day a year on which it is right and honourable to celebrate the mere and miraculous fact of your existence.
I can understand not everyone feels the need to mark their shuffle towards the final credits with cáca milis and candles, but I find my early indoctrination into birthday-culture hard to shake.
Small wonder, given that those early birthdays were a hoot. With the caterer (my mother) providing a gourmet spread of Rice Krispie buns and cocktail sausages, we five-year-olds would carouse the afternoon away with toasts of red lemonade. (The existence of which, by the way, I never questioned until an American friend came to visit when I was well into my 20s. “Red lemonade?” he queried as I cracked open a bottle of TK. “Lemons aren’t red.” And that is why they are the leaders of the free world.)
We would all fizz around playing pass the parcel or whatever games the entertainment (my father) could coordinate in a roomful of additive-addled children, pumped up on refined sugar, who could only be quieted by the appearance of the birthday cake. Its entrance, aglow with candles, was a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with an open flame, and though the act of blowing them out was a high- pressure event – the disappointment if you missed even one with your best lung-busting puff, the ignominy of having to go for a third attempt – it was also where the magic of becoming one year older appeared to take place. You didn’t really go from five years old to six years old till you blew out six candles. Once you accomplished that, however, the parental paparazzi would take a photograph of the birthday child surrounded by a sea of plump-cheeked five- and six-year-old faces that would prove largely unidentifiable later in life, but who were clearly my homies of high babies, keen friendships forged in little break, and forgotten by the time the next birthday rolled around some aeons later.
At the time, of course, birthday parties were a big part of the social calendar. Mostly the same people who came to your parties invited you to theirs, and everyone knew where they stood in the national school scheme of things. Once, however, a girl in my high babies class called Hilary issued an invitation to her birthday shindig, an unexpected turn of events given that we had never even exchanged pleasantries in the school yard. Still, I don’t mind saying I was delighted with myself when I tripped home to tell my mother/secretary to slot a new engagement into our Saturday schedule between 3pm and 6pm.
A few days later, my mother took me solemnly aside and explained that Hilary’s mother had been forced into a public climbdown. It turns out Hilary had invited every girl in her class, not to mention a few stragglers from first and second class that she’d happened upon in her forays from classroom to yard, and her mother had to go on serious damage limitation in an attempt to cull the numbers before the 50-odd five-year-olds showed up on her doorstep for their cocktail sausages. Hilary and I never spoke again.
I might have felt sorry for her, but I was too busy marshalling my small reserves of compassion on behalf of the unfortunate few whose birthdays fell in summer time, thus depriving them of the notable delight of having the whole class sing them a heartfelt if probably tuneless happy birthday. My objective conclusion was that the only real month for a birthday was March, with its added bonus of the likelihood of your birthday falling during Lent, allowing for a special day of dispensation from the forswearing of sweet things.
Now I’ve reached adulthood, of course, such annual excitements are deemed well behind me. Birthdays are to pass with measured acknowledgment, and those who make impolite inquiries about one’s age are best met with frosty hesitancy, zero disclosure or a barefaced lie, if one is up to it, at least according to the social mores of our time. And being honest, I’m not immune to some reluctance to admit my age, particularly when such an admission might be deemed likely to incur judgment. Do I really want to tell people I’m turning 36? What if I’m thereby deemed too old for this party/dress/boyfriend/column?
When I was a chiseller, people were only charmed to hear me chant my age at every meeting. It was a number I was inordinately proud of, and I would bellow it at the top of my lungs, hoping it would be accorded the respect I deemed such maturity merited. It seems particularly unfair that same ageing process is what has put paid to such behaviour. Surely I should be shouting it out louder than ever.
Now that I’m not actively benefiting from it, it seems timely to take on this pesky cult of youth once and for all, and start putting all the candles back on the cake. A birthday is a cause for celebration, after all, and surely the more you clock up, the bigger the reason for such. Of course, by the time you read this, it’ll be someone else’s birthday and I will be a whole year older and on the countdown to the next. Tempus bleedin’ fugit. Happy birthday, whoever you are.