My birthday is June 25, meaning, as I write, the 24-hour period that will begin four hours from now. Each year, I am more aware—in the way that I am more aware of gravity’s impact on my bones and muscles and skin—that the only thing to do on a birthday, the only sure thing, the only “death and taxes” thing, is to be told—no, instructed—to have a “happy birthday.” The way you will surely spend the day is to have other people order you to enjoy it.
Don’t get me wrong. It is so lovely to be for a moment the center of attention of people who love you, remember you, and wish you well. Each year I receive my first “Happy Birthday!” in the late afternoon of June 24 from a friend who lives in New Zealand. “Hari Huritau!” is her annual Maori greeting. The last smile-inspiring message I receive will drift in on the 27th or 28th, accompanied by the unnecessary apology of belatedness. Birthdays often seems like the only remaining redeeming quality of Facebook, apart from Marketplace.
But doesn’t it also seem, as you get older, and the years race heedlessly ahead like a brakeless car, and the space between birthdays contracts, that the celebratory portion of our common life together becomes a pattern of repeating birthdays you must remember, log, acknowledge, sing a dumb song for, eat too-sweet cake for, buy a superfluous gift for, and then do again, and again, and again? In my family, my birthday is followed by those of three more family members, all within two weeks. It gets old, like me.
June 25 is exactly six months from Christmas, so when I was kid, I got two evenly spaced days of the year when I was allowed to eat sugar cereal and Swedish fish for breakfast. That, for a child of eight, is what constitutes a great birthday. How about for a teenager of 18? A party of friends, of course, whom I was blessed to be able to host at a pool. My birthday memories from that era are full of images of college friends, high school friends, friends from my waitressing job at the Gaslight and housekeeping job at the Red Lion, my sister’s friends from Mixed Company, my family’s friends, jumping off the railing in the water, giving themselves wedgies on the slide to make it more slippery, my mother carrying a chocolate cake whose candles light up the darkness and walking toward me as I sit in the middle of a circle of happy, familiar faces.
What makes a great birthday when you are 52?
There is no going back to carefree pool parties, and though I still love sugar, it just makes me feel guilty. Of course I still have friends, and I will spend the evening celebrating with some special ones, but the gift of being 52, I am discovering, is to realize the pleasure to be had in doing nothing apart from standing still and looking at things. On vacation in Maine last week, I spent half an hour standing waist-deep in the ocean, studying a lion’s mane jellyfish. Just a few years ago, maybe last year even, I would have stood there and not noticed the gorgeous creature four feet to my left, its willowy tentacles burnt orange and brown, its top clear, pinkish, and gray.
I was watching the play of sunlight on the water, how it shifted the way the objects appeared on the ocean floor, when one of the stones suddenly propelled itself gracefully upward and upward until its jellied top briefly breached the surface, paused there, glistening, and then descended, using the same rhythmic propulsions. Words, of course, are not adequate to describe these things. They are inadequate, too, to describe the way the full-grown maple tree beside my neighbor’s house bent in tonight’s windstorm, how it moved forward and backward, its trunk as firm as a mountain, how its leaves inverted as one to show their whitish underbellies, before returning, as one, to their natural state, like a wave of dancers swaying in unison. My God, it is all just here, beside me in the water, outside my window, inviting me to behold it.
I have to notice. I am strapped into this forward-facing vehicle that has no reverse or park option, and whose speed only ever increases. It would never relent and let me freeze a feeling, stop to collect my thoughts before continuing, or return to a magic moment poorly appreciated at the time but which now I would know enough to do right by. No. I am only hurtled from day to night to day again.
What makes one day unlike the next?
Lion’s mane jellyfish, the flexibility of maple trees, and also a woman I never met, whose name I don’t know, who sowed the seed of a meal I just prepared for my family. This woman, so I was told, was the owner of Blue Moon Shrooms, a purveyor of cultivated shitake and oyster mushrooms, but she died, and her business closed. She, or someone working on her behalf, somehow spread the spores, or mycelium, in such a way that her mushrooms now grow in the wild in various places around southern Berkshire County. (I imagine someone with long, flowing hair selecting her spots, opening a bag and shaking out fairy dust that glitters like fireflies, but I imagine the process is more complicated than that. I don’t want to look up the info and ruin a fantasy.)
One of the wild places her fairy dust was spread is a dead log and its adjacent tree stump on the Housatonic rail trail that happen to be very near to my house, right at the entrance to the path I take nearly every day. She ensured that this fallen log and this tall tree stump, this detritus of a quiet wood where very few people go, would once, twice, three times a year explode with brilliant shelves of golden-gilled oyster mushrooms. This year, I had only noted one little spray that emerged at the end of May. I had high hopes for that wee spray, but those days were hot and dry, and it ended up shriveling in the sun.
The moment I returned home from Maine this past Saturday, though, I felt the humid air and could see in my mind’s eye the harvest that awaited me. So, even as thunder threatened, and the wind picked up, I grabbed a bag and headed to the trail. The log and stump were so abundantly full of yellow, so distinct from the rest of the green bushes and trees, that I could see them, as if a revelation from heaven, at a distance. I stopped and offered that sacred site a Rocky salute and yelled, “You beauties!” I collected my fill and sprinted home as the rain poured down, my beauties clutched to my chest.
Yellow oyster mushrooms, the descendants of yellow oyster mushrooms cultivated long ago, are my birthday gifts, and they were given to me by a woman whose good work lives on without her. I can’t tell her how much I appreciate this mute, minuscule, magnificent miracle she set in place years ago, this perennial miracle that renews itself each year at the time of my birthday, that injects my mind with golden joy, immunizing it for a time from forethoughts of doom, from the knowledge that I, too, will die, from the fear that I may end up having never offered anyone a gift as beautiful as mushrooms.
