My birthday fell on Easter this year, the first time since 1928. Needless to say, I was not around for that one.
We live right next to a Catholic church, and the combination of my all day drinking eating festival and the non-stop stream of churchgoers was an interesting combination. Standing in the driveway sipping a bourbon and coke and mocking Easter bonnets is probably a sure-fire way to earn me the teleporter to hell award.
There was also snow on the ground for my birthday, and it was about 20 degrees with a stiff north-west wind. Not even my brand new fancy firepit warmed us up too much.
I cannot remember a birthday where there was snow on the ground, but I am sure at some point there was, I did grow up in the Northwest. My mother says on the day I came home from the hospital it snowed alot, but again, I don’t remember that.
Whenever I think of childhood birthdays, I think of my eighth birthday. It was warm and sunny, and my father was burning the fields. I had tried to help him, but it was windy and dry, and he was worried that I would get burned, so he had banished me to the deck of the house. I stood there and watched and pouted and felt like a kid. My parents had the audacity to buy me a doll for my birthday, and I was pretty peeved about that. I thanked them and carried it around all day, but I remember being very upset that my parents did not know me well enough to know that I would never want a baby doll.
I can remember exactly what that day looked like.
As a junior pyromaniac burning the fields was always my favorite task. My father was correct in the assumption that it was too windy, and I watched, biting my nails as always as my father ran around the field trying to keep the fire from going towards the trees in our front yard.
The farthest tree from the house was my tree, where I would go and sit and read and hide sticks and rocks in the special hole in it. Of course the fact that most of the tree was hollow meant that it was mostly dead and when the fire jumped the fire line and reached the base it went up like a small twig.
After the fire department left that night, and we had all retired the house, I was absolutely inconsolable. A doll. My tree burned to the ground. I had lost at least six sticks, a pine cone or two, a Sweet Valley High Book, and a small plastic smiley face that was my prized possession at the time. I had also lost the pine needle basket my father made me for Christmas, but that was okay, squirrels had eaten most of it, and at least I wouldn’t get in trouble for ruining my father’s artwork.
That is pretty much the only birthday I remember from my childhood. I know that I had birthday parties and I am sure there was cake and food and all that good stuff, but I have no recollection of them. I only remember small snippets from childhood. Names, not faces. Places, not events. Smells, tastes, impressions, but not the actual happenings. I remember the parts that are recorded in pictures, written in journals, the moments when something traumatic happened.
Is everyone like that?
I have spent most of my writing career focusing on my incredibly interesting childhood, but I often wonder if the stories I tell are invented by the writer in me, or if they actually happened.
(ramble ramble….the end)
