My Birthday Calendar
There’s a TikTok flying around mocking baby boomers for keeping paper calendars, and I admit, although I read the newspaper and even books on my cellphone, I cling to wall calendars. Yes, I’m a sucker for a good display of New England’s covered bridges, but it’s my “perpetual” calendar that remains a blueprint of my life.
This calendar spans several centuries of loved ones’ birthdays and graces my bedroom door. It’s plastered with red- and blue-inked names never crossed out, whether or not the people are long gone or even ones who broke my heart.
As I write this, it’s the birthday of a friend I went to summer camp with 60 years ago.
Going about my morning, teaching and doing laundry, I’m also picturing the girl who carried a heavy wooden canoe upside down with me in the Adirondacks when we were 10 years old.
The special dates of family members fill the pages. Tomorrow I will celebrate my Dutch sisterin-law, who taught me to eat the saltiest black licorice and drink strong coffee after we rode bikes (with gloves attached to the handlebars) along icy canals in her hometown.
In a few weeks, I’ll honor my grandfather, born in 1896. He had an eighth-grade education and sold sheet music of original songs on the streets of New York with his brother to make money after their father died.
The birthday of my son and the date we adopted him, his Gotcha Day, appear. He refused my offerings of paper calendars years ago. Instead, the tattoos inked on his body are his way of honoring important people in his life.
My Ohio grandmother’s birthday is coming up. She wrote in fine cursive penmanship, in a letter to my grandfather, “Please consider the blot as a kiss,” after she stained the envelope with ink.
In February I’ll think of my brother on what would have been his 72nd birthday, and the time our mother carved out a pumpkin for part of his pumpkin-headed ghost Halloween costume — but it was so large he had to push the pumpkin around the neighborhood in a wheelbarrow.
In early October is the birthday of my grits-loving husband, whom I fell in love with the moment I heard his Southern accent on our first telephone call. Also noted: the woman in my exercise class I became fast friends with, who told me about a pretty town hall where I later chose to get married.
I put my hands to the calendar as if I’m reading Braille and find the birthday of my student who hid in a coal bin in Budapest during World War II, as well as the birthdate of my friend’s daughter who found life too much to bear. Another upcoming date sparks a memory of a garden in Holland, when the sun shone bright until 10 o’clock and we ate herring and just-picked raspberries and fresh bread.
And what joy, we have grandchildren, born fresh as flowers, who if our planet is still here, could live into the 22nd century. Their names and dates are scrawled next to those of family members born in the 19th.
On the birthdays of those no longer with us, I play music they loved, or treat myself to a piece of pumpkin pie or cheesecake or even cereal with orange juice, which one friend insisted was delicious.
I recently discovered that millennials are sending paper birthday cards, in record numbers, spending more than other age groups. Has the digital explosion in our lives made the unfashionable fashionable again?
I’m working on a TikTok response, Dr. Seuss Green Eggs and Ham style:
No, I will not take down my paper calendars.
I will not throw them in the trash.
It’s important to remember whether it’s January or November, no matter who taunts us in any kind of weather.