Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes
Birthdays
Birthdays
By the time you read this I will have had my 60th birthday. The funny thing is that I don’t feel much older or wiser than when I turned 5 and that’s partly what
this column is about: the milestones that sometimes feel like millstones and the wisdom that sometimes does not come at the appointed or expected times. The
90-year-old mother of a friend of mine once looked at my friend annoyedly and asked, “Why do you always ask me tough questions that all translate into your
asking ‘what’s the meaning of life’? I’m looking at the same world you’re looking at and I have many of the same questions. It’s just that I’m looking at the world
through older eyes.”
I have a feeling what my friend’s mother was trying to say and my first hint came on my 5th birthday about 55 years ago. Back in the “old days” in New York
we didn’t have big birthday parties every year. Sure. A handful of family and friends would get together every birthday — even on inauspicious birthdays like the
7th or 11th — and the cake and ice cream tasted just as good on the off years. But big parties were reserved for special birthdays like the 5th, 10th or maybe even
the 13th for kids like me who somehow managed to stay out of reform school. (Reform school didn’t reform kids, by the way. They just made already scary kids
scarier and hard kids harder.)
You might be wondering what the difference is between a small, intimate birthday celebration on, let’s say, your 7th birthday versus a bona fide party on
your 10th. There are several things that make the special parties special. Here are some: On the special birthdays, several of your friends would get invited over
to your apartment and they’d get party hats, party favors (little presents to commemorate the occasion and to erase the bad feelings that could result from the
birthday person being the only one to open presents), poppers (those things that were about the size of a hot dog, wrapped in crepe paper and twisted on the
ends, and when you pulled the ends the things would explode or pop and spray confetti all over the place), and those obnoxious little things that uncurled and
squeaked when you blew them. At the big parties, games like pin the tail on the donkey would likely be played.
But much of the excitement was in the preparation. I remember getting ready for my 5th birthday party. My grandmother, aunt, mother and father would be
there. This was the crew that was present at all birthdays. My grandmother and aunt combined their talents to make the best cakes imaginable. Home made.
From scratch. Butter, eggs, flour and secret ingredients mixed in a bowl with a wooden spoon that I got to lick when they were done. The cakes always had hard,
white frosting. If I remember correctly, the hardness had something to do with egg whites. Nothing like it in the world. I’m convinced that the love with which the
cakes were prepared had a lot to do with their indescribable flavor.
The day of my 5th birthday party finally arrived. My mother and I walked through the housing projects, around the barricades that were set up to prevent
pedestrians and vehicles from being swallowed up by the huge hole that periodically opened up in the middle of Avenue D between 13th and 14th Street by the
Consolidated Edison power plant, then west on 14th Street until we arrived at the Woolworth’s 5 & 10 Cent Store. An entire store aisle was devoted to birthday
things. There was shelf after shelf filled with birthday hats. All kinds of hats. Glistening red imitation firemen’s hats (there were no firewomen at that time as far as I
know), fake derbies and the usual pointed party hats with the elastic chin straps. There were birthday table cloths made out of colorful paper, blowup clowns with
big red-painted lips, festive napkins, cups, thousands of little toys for party favors, whistles, balloons, streamers, huge shiny cardboard letters with multi-colored
metallic-looking surfaces that spelled HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and many other birthday things that exploded on shelves like a huge kaleidoscope that had gone wild
and blown up to spray the universe with millions of fragments of color, fun and energy.
I thought that all the birthday things in the store were set out for my special party. That the people in the 5&10 Cent Store were aware of my special day.
That I mattered so much that the entire city of New York knew that I was about to turn 5 years old. As these contrived realizations descended on me I got the
overwhelming feeling that life couldn’t do anything but get better with each successive birthday and that my 10th birthday would be twice as good as my 5th. It
was a good and powerful feeling. I felt sad and a little embarrassed when my mother only purchased a few plain birthday hats and party favors. I felt that we
should have bought more since the store had gone to all the trouble of putting out all those birthday goodies for me to pick from.
Then my mother broke the news to me. The birthday aisle at the 5&10 Cent Store didn’t have anything to do with my birthday. The display was designed to
entice people to buy birthday things because every day was somebody’s birthday. Nobody in the store knew my name and they cared even less that it was my
birthday. Funny thing was that everybody in the store and outside of the store had at least one thing in common — a birthday. We had all been born. We had all
lived in liquid environments inside our mothers until it was time to have the connecting tube severed. Maybe birthday aisles in stores were there to remind us of
these very basic human connections. Maybe the belief in some sort of cosmic commonality evaporates when mothers are forced to tell their children that
birthday party store aisles are not packed with glorious things because of any particular specialness their children possess, or that the tooth fairy doesn’t really
exist or that Santa Claus is just the repo man in disguise.
Anyway. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to all of us because it’s somebody’s birthday every day.
this column is about: the milestones that sometimes feel like millstones and the wisdom that sometimes does not come at the appointed or expected times. The
90-year-old mother of a friend of mine once looked at my friend annoyedly and asked, “Why do you always ask me tough questions that all translate into your
asking ‘what’s the meaning of life’? I’m looking at the same world you’re looking at and I have many of the same questions. It’s just that I’m looking at the world
through older eyes.”
I have a feeling what my friend’s mother was trying to say and my first hint came on my 5th birthday about 55 years ago. Back in the “old days” in New York
we didn’t have big birthday parties every year. Sure. A handful of family and friends would get together every birthday — even on inauspicious birthdays like the
7th or 11th — and the cake and ice cream tasted just as good on the off years. But big parties were reserved for special birthdays like the 5th, 10th or maybe even
the 13th for kids like me who somehow managed to stay out of reform school. (Reform school didn’t reform kids, by the way. They just made already scary kids
scarier and hard kids harder.)
You might be wondering what the difference is between a small, intimate birthday celebration on, let’s say, your 7th birthday versus a bona fide party on
your 10th. There are several things that make the special parties special. Here are some: On the special birthdays, several of your friends would get invited over
to your apartment and they’d get party hats, party favors (little presents to commemorate the occasion and to erase the bad feelings that could result from the
birthday person being the only one to open presents), poppers (those things that were about the size of a hot dog, wrapped in crepe paper and twisted on the
ends, and when you pulled the ends the things would explode or pop and spray confetti all over the place), and those obnoxious little things that uncurled and
squeaked when you blew them. At the big parties, games like pin the tail on the donkey would likely be played.
But much of the excitement was in the preparation. I remember getting ready for my 5th birthday party. My grandmother, aunt, mother and father would be
there. This was the crew that was present at all birthdays. My grandmother and aunt combined their talents to make the best cakes imaginable. Home made.
From scratch. Butter, eggs, flour and secret ingredients mixed in a bowl with a wooden spoon that I got to lick when they were done. The cakes always had hard,
white frosting. If I remember correctly, the hardness had something to do with egg whites. Nothing like it in the world. I’m convinced that the love with which the
cakes were prepared had a lot to do with their indescribable flavor.
The day of my 5th birthday party finally arrived. My mother and I walked through the housing projects, around the barricades that were set up to prevent
pedestrians and vehicles from being swallowed up by the huge hole that periodically opened up in the middle of Avenue D between 13th and 14th Street by the
Consolidated Edison power plant, then west on 14th Street until we arrived at the Woolworth’s 5 & 10 Cent Store. An entire store aisle was devoted to birthday
things. There was shelf after shelf filled with birthday hats. All kinds of hats. Glistening red imitation firemen’s hats (there were no firewomen at that time as far as I
know), fake derbies and the usual pointed party hats with the elastic chin straps. There were birthday table cloths made out of colorful paper, blowup clowns with
big red-painted lips, festive napkins, cups, thousands of little toys for party favors, whistles, balloons, streamers, huge shiny cardboard letters with multi-colored
metallic-looking surfaces that spelled HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and many other birthday things that exploded on shelves like a huge kaleidoscope that had gone wild
and blown up to spray the universe with millions of fragments of color, fun and energy.
I thought that all the birthday things in the store were set out for my special party. That the people in the 5&10 Cent Store were aware of my special day.
That I mattered so much that the entire city of New York knew that I was about to turn 5 years old. As these contrived realizations descended on me I got the
overwhelming feeling that life couldn’t do anything but get better with each successive birthday and that my 10th birthday would be twice as good as my 5th. It
was a good and powerful feeling. I felt sad and a little embarrassed when my mother only purchased a few plain birthday hats and party favors. I felt that we
should have bought more since the store had gone to all the trouble of putting out all those birthday goodies for me to pick from.
Then my mother broke the news to me. The birthday aisle at the 5&10 Cent Store didn’t have anything to do with my birthday. The display was designed to
entice people to buy birthday things because every day was somebody’s birthday. Nobody in the store knew my name and they cared even less that it was my
birthday. Funny thing was that everybody in the store and outside of the store had at least one thing in common — a birthday. We had all been born. We had all
lived in liquid environments inside our mothers until it was time to have the connecting tube severed. Maybe birthday aisles in stores were there to remind us of
these very basic human connections. Maybe the belief in some sort of cosmic commonality evaporates when mothers are forced to tell their children that
birthday party store aisles are not packed with glorious things because of any particular specialness their children possess, or that the tooth fairy doesn’t really
exist or that Santa Claus is just the repo man in disguise.
Anyway. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to all of us because it’s somebody’s birthday every day.