Birthdays chart life’s ups and downs
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
– Madeleine L’Engle, American writer
It’s my birthday tomorrow. Not a biggie, more a gentle reminder that my 60s are flashing by. Some days I look in the mirror and my father looks back at me: same white hair, brown eyes, black eyebrows with flecks of white. How can this be?
I pencil out the white flecks in my eyebrows. My father certainly never did that. Recently I had my eyebrows tinted and they turned out blacker than black, kind of bouncing out of my face. I looked like a ghost with dark issues. It took a few days – and lots of scrubbing – for them to calm down.
The ghosts of birthdays past are mostly about sunny days. Although this must not be entirely accurate, given the vagaries of November weather where you can have four seasons in one day.
But the images in my head are of celebratory picnics as a kid at Matamata Hot Springs and Lake Karapiro, and a party on our farm where a posse of little girls trooped up the hill in their best dresses to fly a kite on a peerless afternoon.
My 21st birthday was a sunny backyard barbecue at the Forest Lake house that my husband Bill and I bought after we were married. I already had the key to the door so was spared my generation’s regulation coming-of-age gift of a key-shaped mirror with bevelled edges and ‘‘21’’ in bold gold lettering. My generous parents gave me a Singer sewing machine that they fondly imagined would be put to good use by a fledgling homemaker. Sadly I was never much chop with it.
My brother-in-law brought a bag of freshly harvested mussels to the 21st and he and Bill steamed them open on a charcoal barbecue. We drank Marque Vue bubbly and beer and played the latest hits outdoors on a portable recordplayer with a dodgy lead to a powerpoint.
On my 30th birthday, Bill and I celebrated in the Auckland Domain with our friends, Dott and Brian. Brian was a chef and he’d packed a picnic basket of marvellous food and French champagne and it seemed much more sophisticated than mussels and Marque Vue.
I’ve still got the poppy-coloured dress with a dropped waist and silk sash that I wore to my 40th birthday party, although it doesn’t fit any more, and there’s a video of that night starring friends with bouffy hair wearing 1980s’ fashion crimes like mine. Jumpsuits were particularly popular and shoulder-pads were the size of inflated whoopee cushions. Some guests had secretly raided my wardrobe for a surprise showing of hoardings.
A few years after my 40th we held our sons’ 21st parties at the same Forest Lake house. There were kegs and raucous crowds who hoovered large quantities of food and drank the decent red earmarked for the parents and their friends. After one of these occasions someone accidentally ran over a neighbour’s cat, which caused a lot of upset.
On my 51st birthday I got a call of the worst kind, the news that a beloved cousin had been found dead that morning. He had committed suicide. He left his family bereft and bewildered and the day became significant for a deeply tragic reason. The following year, as the anniversary of his death rolled around, Bill bought me beautiful flowers and took me away for a mystery weekend.
Nowadays, he can’t do things like that. His illness is such that he can barely recognise me, let alone understand that it is my birthday, a day that he had always made special. It is a huge sadness and a constant reminder of the fragility and uncertainty of life.
For Bill’s 60th we’d put on a big, happy shindig in the new home we’d built, I’d made him a fruity fig and chocolate cake with oozy ganache icing, and we’d had no idea that we wouldn’t grow old together in the way we’d imagined.
Birthdays, of course, don’t stop just because things change. So tomorrow I’m at the beach for a day with our kids, grandkids and friends. I’ll be making a few ‘‘notes to self’’, the annual anniversary resolutions of (finally) sorting out a regular fitness regime, keeping the garden in better nick, and maybe going easy on the eyebrow tint. Even as I write this, I know little of it is likely to happen. We’re surely born to fail at some things.
So happy birthday to all those who landed in the world on November 19; may the spirit of this good day – in all its forms – be with you.