On Being a B-Day Baby
Last week was my birthday (yay!) and all of you gave me a wonderful present (how incredibly thoughtful of you): cruising past the 200 subs mark (incredible!). All this kindness and generosity got me thinking about birthdays even more. I wrote about turning 30 around this time last year and what big milestone birthdays feel like… but this year I turned 31…kinda a nothing birthday in my opinion, and I started ruminating on birthdays in general and, as so often happens with my dumb brain, the thoughts started tumbling out like when you wait too long to take out the trash and when you finally do the bag breaks and all this gross wet garbage falls all over the place and you just kind of stand there fuming…that’s kinda what my brain did.
Being a birthday adult is one thing: you get texts and emails and facebook messages (you guys remember when you’d go through and see how many people sent you a FB message on your birthday and that was a measure for how cool/popular you were? Weird times.) then you go out to dinner or drinks and get hammered and throw up in the street or whatever. As a kid though, it was pure magic.
I still have fond and vivid memories of childhood birthday parties: bounce houses, laser tag, go carting, etc. Two of my own birthdays really stand out when I look back, though: one year my parents, who are seriously so awesome (shout out to you, Susan and Steve, y’all rock) hired these reptile people (easy there Qanon folks, not half-reptile-half-humans) to come to our house and let a bunch of sugar-crazed children play with HUGE snakes that no doubt were looking at each and every one of us like a chubby little snack. I still have photos somewhere of like 10 six-year-old struggling to hold up this massive boa constrictor…what a party.
My other favorite party was even more creative. As a kid I LOVED Hot Wheels. Those little diecast metal cars on orange plastic tracks never failed to capture my attention. Well, one year my parents got some guy, who (and seriously how the heck do you get into this job and how do you FIND someone with this job before the widespread use of the internet???) built these GIANT Hot Wheels tracks in our front yard. It was so cool, I still have dreams about it. And since I was the lucky birthday boy, I got to use the special birthday car that was cooler than all the other cars.
One problem with this birthday was that it was SO cool that my childhood friend Connor, (if you’re reading this Connor I know you’re a grownup with a wife and a house but I will NEVER forgive you for this) COPPIED my exact party 2 weeks later and he got to be the cool birthday car and everybody told him what a cool party he had and I’m still fuming over it like 25 years later because I am a very small and very petty man.
Anyways, do you have any super cool or special birthday memories from when you were a kid? Tell me about them so I can copy them next year.
Wow. Your parents sound amazing! And the memories of those b'day parties, fun times! We were more of a working class family, so giant snakes and slot cars were not going to happen. I did get one present I still remember: It was called Jimmy Jet (Television ad featuring young boy deliriously happy, as a voiceover said, "You can FLY, FLY FLY! with Jimmy Jet!") and it was a battery operated kind of dashboard and little plastic jet plane type steering mechanism with a display screen that showed an extremely rudimentary flight path - I mean, this is way before cgi, so it was more of a rolling, repetitive scroll, and there were sound effects of a jet "whoosh" sound, and I think you could hit buttons on the right and left of the wheel to fire little plastic missiles that went about four feet. Totally cold war military industrial complex stuff and I loved it. Other than that, the only other birthday memory from childhood was of being awakened by my mom and dad one birthday morning at about five a.m. (they had just come home from closing the restaurant after a Saturday Night/Sunday morning) because it was snowing lightly. And my birthday is May 8th. Yay, Wisconsin! They said I'd remember it the rest of my life. And they were right. The best birthdays I've had are adult ones. A fantastic 30th birthday party in New York where my best friend and I (our birthdays are ten days apart) dressed up as old men for a drunken extravaganza during which our significant others - who we both ended up marrying - presented us with an obscene birthday cake, a great birthday with my wife and son at the best steak house in Toronto with a bottle of Shiraz from Australia that the three of us fell in love with, and a birthday that fell on the same day as a double header at my son's school in which he pitched one game and caught the other. I think they won both, but I know he won the game ball in one game, because he gave it to me and I still have it.
You have had some STELLAR birthday parties my friend. My favorite was my 30th: my dear fiancé and I ran off to a small beach town in Mexico. My phone was off, and there were almost no one else around. It was incredible. I highly recommend you copy it next year. (My fiancé is probably available.)