Happy Birthday to Me: a Eulogy for Yet Another Year

CD Anderson | On 07, Jul 2014

Someone important, somewhere said, in a book or something, “there comes a point in your life when the singing of Happy Birthday to the candles on your birthday cake suddenly turns into the slow burning of waxy daggers staked right through the center of your old, diseased heart, melting away your very essence, drop by agonizing drop, all the while, every person you’ve ever wronged recalls every lie you’ve ever told and recounts every cent you’ve ever wasted.”

Actually, I’ll admit, I just made that all up. It’s my birthday this week, and I get to make stuff up all week – it’s right there in the birthday handbook – and then put it all into really long sentences that violate all laws of common sense, and make it sound like a Edgar Allan Poe story.

I also get to be embittered, enraged even, against the advancing armies of age. I get free reign to mope around the house, kick the dog, write strongly-worded letters to several pinko newspaper editors who have no idea what they are talking about, and complain about the weather (only slightly more than on non-birthday weeks).

I get to sit in a dark corner all week long, miserably strumming my out-of tune three-string guitar, first with an A-minor (the sad chord) followed by the E-minor-phrygian with diminished 5th (the angry chord), and then another A-minor, only slower and more tortured, followed by another feisty phrygian, this time faster and angrier, until my wife yells across the house, telling me my order of the world’s smallest violin has arrived, and I had better start growing up and get a fire started for that well-worn South African institution: the Birthday Braai.

He’s in Parties

As if the slow charring of unnecessarily butchered meat is going to make me feel any better, now I have to entertain large numbers of my closest friends and family with self-inflated tales of my adventures in advertising, half-baked political opinion and half-remembered sport scores, when all I really want to do is have a quiet lie-down and try not to remember the exact number of men who have heart attacks before age 40.

Predictably, we will all sit around discussing how young I look for my age, cracking jokes about how one day I will die, and that today, this gathering of well-intentioned celebration, is just one more confirmation of this fact.

Inevitably, there will be a cake presented amidst much fanfare, topped with those unavoidable blazing death sticks of my ever-dwindling time on earth, specifically designed to teach me how to use my lungs.

I have never really understood this part myself: constantly being reminded to blow the damn things out.

“Go on, blow them out, boy,” we’re told from Year One.

“Why? What for? What if I just let them all burn down to the bottom of the cake, and maybe, I don’t know, BURN THIS WHOLE FRIKKEN POPSICLE STAND TO THE GROUND?!

Why do I not have this option, as opposed to the one that involves me just unloading a bunch of spit and halitosis on this confectionery item that y’all are about to eat?

Sadly, this kind of freewheeling individuality is discouraged from an early age, often distracted with the presentation of gifts. All just for you. For me? Oh, you shouldn’t have. Five minutes later, you realise, yes, they shouldn’t have.

Gifts are the gods’ way of giving you orgasms with your clothes on. And, as any modern woman will tell you, sometimes you get them, sometimes you don’t. “Oh well, better luck next year, darling,” leaves you sitting there with a plastered-on smile and a floppy pair of socks in your hand, wondering what you did wrong. A Playstation. Now that would get me swinging from the chandeliers.

The only great gifts are the ones people who conveniently forget to come to your parties get you. I know this because I was a serial one of those as a child.

“Mom, Johnny’s party is tomorrow, can we get him the fully-integrated, electronically powered Grey Skull Castle with matching real laser-firing turrets?”

Tomorrow, inevitably: “time for the party.”

“Oh, sorry, mom, there was an incident. Johnny’s mom caught him going trying on his sister’s panties. Party’s cancelled. Pew! Pew! By the power of Grey Skull…” and so on and so on.

The Winter of my Disapproval

I think the whole difficulty with my birthday is that it happens in July, the dead center of the African winter, when the grass looks like regurgitated sandpaper, the wind has a whooshing chill of disapproval, and every thing just feels like …an incomplete sentence.

The problem with trying to enjoy your birthday during winter, lies in the wearing of its clothes: jerseys, scarves, funny-coloured woolen hats and overpriced jackets, there is no end to the amount of accessorizing that comes with sitting through the winter months – quite literally sitting, unable to move, with half of last year’s Woolies Wacky Winter Wipe-Out Sale breaking your back.

I spend most of my winters putting on clothes, and longing for summers when I can once again wander around the house or the neighbourhood, almost exclusively in boxer shorts and flip-flops.

And why not? Birthdays are but a celebration of the anniversary of your first peek into this crazy world, more often than not, buck-naked and loving it. Why not commemorate that first tangible tinge of terra nova on your tender pelt with a frolic around the garden in your bare essentials. ‘Naked as the day you were born’ is not a much-bandied idiom just because it looks pretty.

My lucky wife’s birthday is in December and she gets to skinny-dip all day, glass of endless wine in one hand and a satisfied smile on her face, confident in the knowledge that her special day will always be sunny side up, perhaps cloudy with a chance of sunburnt nipples towards the late afternoon, but by then she’s had enough wine to laugh it all off with unqualified “Greatest Birthday Ever”. I tried a birthday skinny-dip once; the only ones laughing that chilled July morning were my neighbours.

Birthdays, and their ensuing parties, for the most part, dwindle in appeal as you get older. Those candles might get brighter, but the aftermath is very dark.

Once the party is done, when your friends have buggered off to do more fun things without you, there will much cleaning up to do, dishes to clean, and once again, many sincere apologies for the neighbours.

“Yes, that would be my swingball set on your roof, Mr. Mitchell, I’ll come by in the morning to pick it up when I wake up my friend sleeping in your rose garden…oh, you mean right now?”

When the party’s over, that old song sings, there’ll just be you and me. I’ll rinse and you dry. Is it worth it, all that fun, all those games? Could I have not served my head and liver better by just spending the day in some dark hole, away from the jolly jaunt, down the driveway of my life, of creeping age; his friends death, senility and the one with the box of wine called cirrhosis?

As I begin work on my Foxhole For Forty – a mere two years away, I need to rethink my attitude to birthdays. I need to realise age and birthdays are going to be just fine; it will be a little scary but mostly harmless, sad but very entertaining, sort of like seeing adults wearing winter onesies, or listening to Julius Malema – South Africa’s most famous onesie-wearer- it all just needs to keep me smiling and shaking my head in disbelief, all at the same time.

Happy birthday to me, I belong in a zoo.

*Dedicated to the memory of the late Victor Meldrew.

(fin)

Image Credit: Flickr All other images and editing by Athena

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