Birthday Operations

If I have any advice for those under thirty or thirty-five, it is to enjoy your birthdays. They can still be great as you age, but the older you get the more likely they are to arrive with ambivalence. This is not so much about the decay of body parts and the loss of first-order capacities, nor the ever more ominous sense of one’s demise—though the ambivalence is not not about those things either—but more because the “Wait, what have I done with my life” clichés are harder to avoid.

For my fortieth birthday, my friends D&S threw me a big party. Lots of people. Lots of friends. Lots of “I’m good.”

Twenty years after that party (and not long ago), I stayed at their house for a week housesitting. There thousands of books are arranged in a fashion that would shame the British Library. Need a hardcover of any American fiction? That’s in what used to be in their son’s bedroom. Philosophy and European Lit? In their daughters. Floor-to-ceiling shelves in a house that breathes the rootedness of Penelope and a lifetime of purpose and joy.

(Over the last few days I’ve had reason to search for three books in my Jenga-like stacks. One was just where it was supposed to be. The second was buried and impossible to locate. The third was a book on baseball by A. Bartlett Giamatti in which he says that every spring brings a little more fall with it after you reach a certain age. Or something like that. I could not find it and a fashion that feels impossible. Could I be that disorganized? Even among my relatively small library? (Yes.) But if it is really not here how did I let it go? Did it fall behind the dryer like a sock? Or, as with marriage and a steady address, is it lost in that void where life’s norms disappeared for me?

I spent my fiftieth birthday alone in the apartment of a woman I once loved. She had learned to be happier with someone else and I had to decide whether or not to move to Amsterdam which, as some of you know, is what I did.

Year fifty-nine included returning to America to find my way yet again out of (or into?) that void of life’s norms. Thus the news there would be a party to celebrate my turning sixty came with fear and defensiveness and that ambivalence. Make new friends? Sure. I guess. Must I? What if I want to lick my old—and oldest—wounds?

And yet a few days ago at the local diner, Sage, a high schooler who works there (I call her “Sage-tastic,”) let me know it was her birthday too. She was turning eighteen. Between her boss and colleagues and a few regulars, myself included, it was easy to convince her to wear a candle tiara the boss had bought as she served coffee and eggs, much to the delight of everyone.

To friend Kirk I reported all these events as well as my ambivalence: “Yes,” he said over the phone, “but sometimes the best thing to do is just to show up and perform as you should, as you would for the Queen.”

Now I am sorry to interject politics into this post, but autocracy makes that subject inescapable, and Kirk’s comment reminded me of Mr. Trump’s behavior during his first term, walking with the actual Queen of England, which he did as might a rude alien from Neptune. If the monarchy is an absurd institution it does at least come, unlike a first kiss, say, or the death of an old friend, with clear rules for behavior. In this sense, Johnny Rotten throwing up on the Queen’s shoes would have shown more integrity in terms of knowing who she is than did Trump’s weird walk next to and in front of her. Of the endless examples that expose him as ill-equipped to be a person, let alone President, those few minutes with the Queen are as worth pointing to and any of the rest. Today, of course, to point to his world-ending behavior and democracy-destroying commands is all we should be doing, no matter our age or station.

(In the second book I was looking for William Sloan Coffin, a mostly forgotten voice of social consciousness writes, “Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts.” He also quotes Pablo Casals: “Love of country is a wonderful thing, but why should love stop at the border?”)

O.K. back to birthdays . . . Kirk’s good advice and Sage’s example allowed me to go to the party in the right spirit, have a great time, and play Operation, a deeply analog game I never played as a kid.

So,

For forty, and earlier than that, I might say, with Mary Oliver:

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things

And for fifty, though really for always, Richard Thompson gets it right: “The world's no place when you're on your own. A heart needs a home.”

And at sixty, to borrow again from Coffin: “Clearly the trick in life is to die young as late as possible.”

Thanks to kelly and Seth for insisting I show up and to all of you for reading along.