When Your Birthday Is A Moveable Feast

                                  

   My mother used to say that she always thought of Palm Sunday as my birthday because that’s when she went to the hospital to deliver “Veronica.”  That’s who my parents anticipated. Not only was I a surprise but I was supposed to be female.  So difficult to live up to parents’ expectations.  At least no one chanted Eliot’s famous opening line—“April is cruellest month”—when I entered this vale of tears.  Perhaps my siblings did, since I was the youngest and garnered attention as newborns and toddlers do.

    So while my birth-date has of course been constant, the day of the week on which it falls intersects with the liturgical calendar.  This is first time that I can recall it coinciding with Good Friday.  Challenges one’s flexibility and sense of liturgical decorum, but where there’s a will and deft maneuvering, willfulness can be avoided and gratitude offered for another year of life shared with family and friends.

   I’m reading Genesis in the Vigil service tomorrow night, and today I turned the attention of my Shakespeare class to “a little touch of Harry in the night” as King Henry moves in disguise among his soldiers on the eve of the battle of Agincourt.  His purpose is to encourage, calm their fears, and steel their resolve.  That’s what I need on this day, for the palm branches are wilting and my story of creation is meager.

   My mood is assuaged by birthday poems that speak with melodious melancholy, as does Ted Kooser’s “A Happy Birthday”: (This is the whole poem).

 

This evening, I sat by an open window

 and read till the light was gone and the book

 was no more than a part of the darkness.

 I could easily have switched on a lamp,

 but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

 to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

 with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

 

   Or John Updike, who developed the practice of writing an annual birthday poem for himself on the eighteenth day of the month before my own.  One of these reaches back to childhood, and the fear occasioned by early loss of safe harbor.  Here’s a passage.

                                         In Pomeroy’s Department Store, I lost

                                         My mother’s hand three score and more than ten

                                         long years ago. So panicky I wet

                                         my pants a drop or two, I felt space widen;

                                         when someone not my mother took my hand,

                                         I burbled, unable to cough up who

                                         I was, so unforeseeably alone

                                         Amid these aisles of goods, so unlike home.  

  

   But now I set these musings aside, for methinks I hear granddaughter Kinley Clare at the front door.  She’s arriving to wish “Papa” Happy Birthday!  The present of herself is perpetual gift.  We’ll blow the candles out together!