Indulging on my birthday
It’s my birthday.
I woke to sunshine, and texts from my children and from friends. It’s number 67 (which has some weird cultural significance with the whole “six-seven” thing that kids are doing), and it’s the year I’m getting my first Social Security check. As I was doing my morning stretches, I thought about some of the decades’ worth of birthdays.
And one of them rises to the top. It’s an example of wanting something so much that you never really enjoy it.
When I was turning 6, I asked for a marionette puppet. We’d just seen “The Sound of Music” and it inspired me. My favorite scene in the film was the one where the Von Trapp family puts on that puppet show about the Lonely Goatherd.
Not sure where my parents found it in sleepy Finleyville, but there it was birthday morning, a red and white clown puppet suspended from a web of strings. Finding it delicate to wrap, my parents hung it from a doorknob in the kitchen, so I’d see it when I came down to breakfast.
Wow, that feeling. Someone asks what you want and you tell them, and then there it is: a simple path of desire and met expectations. As I lifted the puppet from the doorknob the strings got tangled and the clown’s hand became stuck to his head. I still can picture the scene — my dad untangling things and showing me the ropes, the clown’s feet tapping on the table.
The puppet was declared a fragile thing, something to be treated gently. That puppet was a singular belonging: my playmates all had the same bikes, the same dolls, and the same board games. But I alone was the owner of a marionette.
My memory of the puppet ends the day of my birthday, and it’s not because I’ve forgotten the rest. I didn’t play with it. After the cake and the candles, I took my gift upstairs to my bedroom, hung it on my closet doorknob, and there it stayed.
Maybe I was worried that I would break or permanently tangle it. Maybe a newly minted 6-year-old isn’t coordinated enough to maneuver it.
I think I regarded that gift as a rare gem, something to save for special times — like the good dinner china or the patent leather shoes that waited at the bottom of my closet for Sunday Mass. The puppet was suspended there, waiting. Perhaps I thought that to play with it would somehow ruin it for when that exceptional occasion came around when I would need it.
We all do versions of this. There’s a cashmere sweater in my closet that cost more than I usually spend and that I’ve never worn. All winter long, I’d reach for it and feel its creamy softness and return it to the shelf to await “a nice occasion.”
There’s a mean little corner of human nature that causes us to wall ourselves off from everyday pleasure: the “right time” is some abstract point on the horizon.
By the time you’re getting the Social Security checks, you’re wise enough to recognize the folly of this. There’s a good chance no occasion will ever be “nice enough” for the expensive sweater, and the good china stays tucked away.
It’s too warm today to wear the sweater, but somewhere at the back of the kitchen pantry is the box of chocolate turtles a friend brought me at Easter, the ones I was saving for company.
I’m going to go get them and eat as many as I want. It’s my birthday, and that’s plenty special enough.