SPECIAL DAYS

A few weeks ago, I wrote here, for the first time, about my birthday. I suppose one of the reasons I’d been thinking about it more than usual was because of the reading I’d been doing. It was reading that had gotten me thinking, not only about my own birthday, but about everyone else’s as well—about what birthdays in general meant, if anything, and about how different people celebrate them, face them, shy away from them, ignore them, or cope with them.

I’ve kind of concluded that, whether we pretend to ignore them or not, if birthdays have any major importance, it is that they are mile-markers, and as such, they qualify as “special days”, days on which we take stock—consciously or subconsciously—of our lives.    

Recently, on the long flight to the US from Patagonia, where I make my home, I began reading a rather odd collection of short stories. The anthology was the brainchild of renowned Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist and translator Haruki Murakami. He had selected, introduced and contributed to the collection, for which he acted as editor, and which he called—rather unremarkably—Birthday Stories. (Vantage, London, 2006, © 2002 H. Murakami) https://www.amazon.com/Birthday-Stories-Haruki-Murakami/dp/0099481553

If the title was unremarkable, however, the idea behind this 2002 project wasn’t. Murakami started out by considering his own birthday in 1949 (the same year I was born), and how his attitude toward it had changed since the progressive days of a Japan ravaged by war and nuclear holocaust that picked itself up out of the ashes and re-tooled into a major world industrial power within a short couple of decades. He traced the change in his own perceptions from a youth replete with idealism and rock ‘n’ roll to this time in 2002 when he was in his fifties and was no longer especially glad to be marking each new anniversary of his birth.

And yet, he thought, what if, at fifty-two, he’d been told he had only a few months to live, and now he was marking his fifty-third or fifty-fourth birthday? That, he indicated, would definitely be cause for celebration! “For that,” he wrote, “I can see chartering a boat and setting off a massive firework display in the middle of Tokyo Bay.”

By the way, I think I failed to mention that Murakami turned sixty-nine yesterday. But what’s important about this is that in his introduction to the birthday anthology, he mentions that he especially remembers one that provided a kind of minor revelation. He was attempting to ignore it, having gotten up, as usual, at about 5 a.m. to write, and turning on the news as he was making his morning coffee. The newsreader is giving a rundown of some of the day’s events and celebrations: “...the Emperor was going to plant a ceremonial tree, or a large British passenger ship was due to dock in Yokohama, or events would be taking place around the country in honor of this being official chewing gum day...” And finally, the newsreader lists famous people whose birthday fell that day, January 12^th, and suddenly he is hearing his own name, “novelist Haruki Murakami,” being read. And this was when he realized that his birthday was no longer “just for him,” that it had become “a public event.”

With this in mind, Murakami pours himself a cup of coffee, carries it to his studio, turns on some music at low volume and, with the Japanese winter darkness still surrounding him outside, sets to work. “The day was just beginning,” he says. “It was a special day in the year, but at the same time, it was an absolutely ordinary day.”

The writer imagined that he might indeed someday have a birthday when he would feel like sailing out into the middle of Tokyo Bay and setting off an armload of fireworks to celebrate. And if that kind of a day ever came, he wouldn’t hesitate to do so. “But today, at least, was not such a day. This year’s birthday was not such a birthday. I would just be sitting at my desk as always, quietly putting in a day’s work.”

As an aside, I recall a personality from my youth who intentionally set out each year to make her birthday a special event. And I remember that, at the time, I thought this was a brilliant idea, since it somehow seemed to renew her zest for life each year. This was in the Buenos Aires of the mid-1970s and the woman in question was a friend of my mother-in-law’s. Her name was Susana and she had been an important political point person at the grass roots neighborhood level for the Peronist movement (also known as Justicialism), surely—and still today—the most important and controversial political movement in the history of Argentina. One that is credited and blamed for every good and bad thing that has happened here in the last seventy-five years...depending on whom you talk to.

And even then, in the nefarious early years of the military regime known as the Proceso, when political activists of just about every color, and especially Peronists, were disappearing left and right or being shot down on the streets, Susana could still fill her house with hard-nosed remnants of the Peronist old guard for her birthday celebration each year. But this was more than a clandestine political get-together. Through my wife’s mother, we had a more intimate insight into this custom and it was clear to me that Susana’s birthday parties were a generous celebration of life with all of her friends, Peronist or not (since my mother-in-law, for instance, could not have been more rabidly anti-Peronist).

As such, there were rituals that went with it. She would re-paint as much as she could afford of the interior of her cozy house that stood at the end of tree-lined Plaza Vélez Sarsfield, next door to the Church of the Candelaria, and every year, like clockwork, she would buy all new linen for her bed and bath and all new lingerie to wear over the course of the following year. When I knew her, she was nearly eighty, but the drive to maintain this tradition, this bit of clear-cut coquettishness and sophistication, was as strong as it had been when she was thirty. Nor would she rest up excessively for the big evening party. At noon she would meet up with some of her most intimate women friends for lunch at a nice restaurant, and in the afternoon, after a brief siesta, there would be tea with her sisters.

For Susana, celebrating “her day” was of paramount importance. It was a way of ending one year on a high note—no matter what other moods the fate of that year had entertained—and of kick-starting the next one, to which she always looked forward with courage and a positive attitude. I found her, then, an absolutely admirable person, because she never seemed to treat a single day that she had been given with indifference or disdain. Each and every one was a gift, a “present” (that no past or future could deny her).  

Haruki Murakami

Anyway, this idea of birthdays being special—selectively rather than generally—stuck with Haruki Murakami and presented itself with certain ramifications. “Special” could mean a lot of things, as was clear from two stories he’d read about the time the idea of a birthday anthology first hit him. One was Timothy’s Birthday, by William Trevor, and the other one was The Moor by Russell Banks.

Trevor’s story is about a young man struggling with a long-running conflict between the life he wants for himself and the one his parents perceive him to have (despite their vision’s being totally at odds with the protagonist’s reality). The reader is given a glimpse at those conflicting realities (plus a third-party view through the eyes of a friend meeting Timothy’s parents for the first time) at the culminating moment when the young man decides to make a stand and refuses to go to his parents’ place for the rather depressing birthday celebration they’ve prepared for him.

There’s a bitter-sweetness and a heart-wrenching statement on the relativity of time in Banks’s masterfully-written story, The Moor. In it, a late-middle-aged guy out with friends on a snowy evening thinks he sees an elderly woman “giving him the eye” from a table where she appears to be celebrating with people who might be her family.

A regular at this bar, the guy asks the owner who the old lady is and what the occasion is. “The old lady’s eightieth,” the owner tells him. There’s a point at which the guy tells his friends he thinks he knows “the old gal from someplace.” And one of his buddies quips, “Probably an old girlfriend.” At which he laughs sarcastically...but his pal has hit the nail right on the head. And the poignant scenes that follow appeal to the deepest of our youthful memories and emotions.

Murakami also includes a Raymond Carver story in this book: namely, The Bath. It’s the story of a child who falls into a coma on his birthday after being hit by a car. This tragedy is played against the separate and—under the circumstances—surreal perception of a baker who wants to collect his sixteen dollars for the birthday cake that was never picked up and on which he thinks he’s been stiffed. It is a stark portrait of a tragic and sardonic twist of fate as only Carver can paint it.

Contentious baked goods also appear in The Birthday Cake, by Daniel Lyons, in which a bitter, cantankerous old woman refuses to give in to her better instincts and change a sad reality for a single mother and her child, simply by, once in her life, foregoing a set and hollow tradition. And in Lynda Sexon’s Turning, three eccentric elderly ladies tell a four-year-old birthday boy the story of the “Emperor Who Had No Skin” (no clothes, you mean; nope, no skin).

If you’ve ever been a pubescent boy, you’ll identify with David Foster Wallace’s story, Forever Overhead. It’s your thirteenth birthday, you have “seven crunchy black animal hairs” in your left armpit and twelve in your right, you’re having a party tonight, and you’re spending the afternoon at the pool. And despite the fact that your family has insisted on tagging along and making a day of it, you can’t help but notice that the poolside is replete with “girl-women...curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own...”

The recently deceased Denis Johnson also puts in an appearance from beyond the grave in this anthology, with Dundun, yet another powerful and senselessly violent image of the mean-streets world he seemed to know so well. In this case, it’s Dundun’s birthday and he’s celebrating by getting stoned on his birthday present (some gifted opium) and, sort of accidently-on-purpose in a drug-laced haze, shooting one of his erstwhile buds—who’s sitting around dying while the relative merits of taking him to a hospital are being slow-motion weighed.

In Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath, Ethan Canin weaves a strange tale of a woman who ends up celebrating her birthday with a lady from the SPCA and a flock of rare blackbirds that fly into her apartment through an open window. And Andrea Lee tells a sexually sophisticated story in The Birthday Present of an American expat living in Italy who decides to fully embrace the idea of “when in Rome...” and give her aging, older husband a date with two high-society call girls for his birthday—with detailed insight into the workings of both her dichotomous inner feelings and of the foreign environment in which she has chosen to live. A similar story but in reverse is A Game of Dice, by Paul Theroux, in which a gambler gives his wife a buff young surfer for her fortieth birthday.

In her simple, cogent style, Claire Keegan shares an introspective birthday moment in the life of a nineteen-year-old boy who decides to take a nocturnal dip in the ocean to celebrate his day. Lewis Robinson’s subjects seem to always have his native Maine as a setting and Ride is no different. It’s the story of a young man, the son of divorced parents, who decides to spend his birthday riding in his truck-driver father's rig. Little does he know that his dad has chosen precisely that day to heist a painting.

And finally, Murakami’s own contribution is called Birthday Girl, and is about a young woman who thinks there’s nothing particularly special about her twentieth birthday and decides to work instead of celebrating, but ends up having one of the strangest and most life-changing moments of her young life.

I can pretty much guarantee that, after reading the Murakami Birthday Stories anthology, you’ll find yourself taking a new look at birthdays and what they mean.     

Whether your birthday is today or some other of the ever-special days of the year, I wish you a very happy one, and many more to come. But “happy” like “special” can mean a lot of things and what I wish you more than anything else is that your special day should be memorable, somehow extraordinary, a day to make you realize that no two days are ever really alike, that every day is a new beginning, that every day that you are alive is truly special, a “present”, because the future only exits in our imaginations.  

A BIRTHDAY STORY — FOREVER YOUNG

Tomorrow is my brother’s Jim’s birthday. I wish I could celebrate it with him. Or at least give him a call. One of those long calls like we used to have together, an hour or more at a time. In both of our “heavy drinking days”—back when our sociologist sister, Darla, once lovingly and patiently, yet pointedly, explained to us the meaning of “functional alcoholic”, and instead of being alarmed, we both decided to wear the moniker proudly—we’d sometimes even have a couple of drinks together over the phone.

Jim on a hike we took together in the Ocala National 

Forest, a few years before his death.

It would be like, “Hey, big bro’, is that the tinkling of ice that I’m hearing?”

“Can’t fool you,” I’d say. “Yeah, I had just served myself a scotch and soda when you called.”

“Well, wait just a damn minute, while I go get something too!” And then he’d be back and I could hear him sip his drink but there was never any tinkling on his end. His drink of choice was Jack Daniels and he drank it neat.

I could picture him, then, the receiver to his ear, and four fingers of dark bourbon in one of the short, chunky, signature Jack Daniels glasses he’d bought when he visited the distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. He had an anecdote about it. He’d been in Nashville for a convention and decided to indulge his love and admiration for high-end Tennessee bourbon by making a side-trip—a pilgrimage almost—to the place where all that amber goodness was crafted.

He walked around town, saw the sights—as many sights as one could see in a town with only one traffic signal—and then went on the hour-long distillery tour. He enjoyed the pristine processing plant, the old-fashioned barrel houses where the whisky aged in peace and without haste. He listened to the tour guide’s explanation of the rigorous and caring processes involved in creating such an extraordinary product.

The whole time, however, at the back of his mind was the joy and satisfaction with which he would, he told himself, splurge on a rare top-line bourbon, the finest Jack Daniels had to offer. And surely he’d be able to buy a case or two of JD black label at a discount. He fantasized as well about the little soiree they were sure to have at the end of the tour, where everyone would have a chance, he reasoned, to sample the merchandise before saying adieu...or y’all come back now, hear?

But when the tour ended, everyone was unceremoniously issued a plastic glass of ice-old lemonade to quench their thirst. Indignant, my brother asked, “Hey, what’s the score? Where’s the hooch?”

To which one of the Jack Daniels employees responded, “Lynchburg’s in a ‘dry’ county.” And going on to address Jim’s still bewildered, expression, he added, “We can make it here, but we can’t sell it or serve it.”    

To paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Bourbon bourbon everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink!

The abundant glassware he’d carried home—official Jack Daniels shot glasses, whiskey glasses, a couple of ashtrays, even a tiny water pitcher, as if he would ever have asked for “water back”—had been to quell his frustration. And in the very next “wet” county, like a man having crossed a desert only to stumble onto a bubbling spring, he had stopped at the first liquor store he could find and bought not one, but two fifths of Jack Daniels, with plans to exact his revenge that very evening on the meddling of the State in the habits of honest and dedicated whisky-drinkers.

Age, I must admit, has chopped my drinking legs off at the knees. I figure if today I were to give myself the free rein we gave ourselves back then to celebrate life and liquor the way Jim and I did every time we had the pleasure of getting together, I’d be unlikely to survive to see the following dawn. But our conversations were never the muttered vacuities of a couple of drunks. “Functional alcoholics” that we were, we managed to drink and think at the same time. Ours were always consequential, often deep, sometimes shocking conversations, since we revealed things to each other that we could never tell anyone else. We were two normally reserved guys who, as brothers and best friends, checked all reservations at the door when we got together. And since I lived most of the time thousands of miles away in South America, we clung to our brief get-togethers as if they were gold-dust. And indeed they were. We trusted each other completely and, as such, seemed to think with a single mind and conscience. It was like no other relationship I can recall before or since. Between us, there was nothing to hide and no fear of having our individual weaknesses exploited, nor any fear of judgment for having them. Everything was forgivable. In fact, everything was taken in stride and advice given when called for or silence invoked whenever it was clear that the only thing needed was a non-judgmental ear. Everything was “what it was,” nothing more or less.

Dan, Darla and Jim, back when life seemed endless.

Looking at Jim’s birthday philosophically, I might optimistically reason that he’s been spared the indignities of aging. He was always younger than his years, a candle flaming, wicks untrimmed, at both ends, a guy with rocketing energy that seemed never-ending. He was a comet who left a long, brightly-burning wake behind him wherever he went. His closest friends worshipped him. So in the nearly twelve years since his sudden death, he has remained the energetic fifty-one-year-old who looked a decade younger. And so he will remain forever in the minds of those of us who had the joy of knowing him. He burst like a roman candle in the night, leaving all of his blinding light and color in the sky, and leaving the rest of us to muddle through without him, in a world that would never, from then on, be quite as bright.

His death spawned, not altogether unexpectedly, an “urban legend” of sorts. In the last few years of his life, he had made some almost cataclysmic changes. Suffice it to say that by then he’d traded an executive life punctuated by fast cars, expensive clothes, fancy clubs and restaurants and golf weekends on the links in the society of similarly upwardly mobile peers, for a full-time job as a school bus driver in Marion County Florida, and for part-time employment as a golf-course caretaker and fence-builder. His personal life was a mess, and the source of great anguish to him, but the jobs, against all odds, seemed to suit him. He seemed at ease in them.

His fellow-drivers appeared not only to admire him but also to genuinely care for him. He was as much of an over-achiever there as in every other endeavor in his life. He kept his bus spotless and helped his workmates do the same. “When he was moving around the compound before going on his run,” one of his female colleagues told me, “he’d always have this spray bottle of window-cleaner hooked on his belt and a clean rag over his shoulder. I’d be pulling out and he’d step out and hold up a hand for me to stop, and then he’d climb up on my bumper and clean my windshield for me before I started my route.”

“When we were finished for the day,” another woman told me, “he’d first get his bus parked and squared away, and then he’d go around having a look at the other buses. If anybody’d forgotten to close their windows, he'd climb aboard and make a quick pass shutting them all. He seemed to always just be thinking about how he could help out all the rest of us. He was such a nice guy.”

So here’s where the urban legend comes in.

A couple of days after a friend got worried because she hadn’t heard from him and called the police, who discovered his body in our family’s condo in Ocala, my sister and I found ourselves, in a general state of shock, meeting there to put our younger brother’s final affairs in order. The lady who had called the police said she had a confession to make. She’d been calling him for several days and had gotten no answer. “In the last message I left him,” she told us, with embarrassment written on her face, “I said, ‘This is the third message I’ve left you. If you don’t answer this one, you had better be dead.’” Turned out, to her chagrin, that he was.

So that same day, we hear the doorbell, and it’s a group of Jim’s bus driver friends. After assuring us that they would take care of his pets—two rabbits, a couple of parakeets and a tank full of tropical fish—they each paid a little tribute to him, telling us how they remembered him. All of them were simple, eloquent and heartfelt stories. Finally, a woman who had wept several times during the visit said she had something to tell us, but didn’t know quite how we’d take it. But then she took a deep breath and launched right in to it.

“We have these cameras on the buses,” she said. “They record everything that happens before, during and immediately after a run. Well, that Monday, your brother didn’t show up for work and we were all worried about him. On Tuesday, I get on my bus and, for some reason, decide to have a look at the CCTV monitor. Usually, what you’ll see from the day before is kids getting on and off and so forth. But this time what I saw was a guy get on the bus with his cap pulled low over his eyes. And he quickly goes down the aisle to the back of the bus and, from there, starts slamming shut the windows I’d forgotten open the evening before. Then he comes up to the camera lens, looks right into it, grins and gives me a little wave. It’s your brother. Then he’s off the bus and gone.”

Darla and I remained there, nodding, as if awaiting the punch line. Then the woman says, “Well, I mean, if what they’ve told us is true, he was dead by then!”

I’ve sometimes described myself as “spiritual but not religious”. I know “live” and I know “dead” and they are nothing alike. The difference is spirit, the miraculous energy of life, which, upon death, seems to vaporize. I guess what bothers me about ghost stories is that I never want to think that a spirit that has suffered death and achieved transfiguration would have any reason to hang around yearning for the lost life of the physical world. In the non-physical spirit form, that energy has been released. It is free and its being in any way encumbered by the physical past just seems utterly illogical to me.

That said, however, the story we heard that day was so very Jim! It was his sensitive yet smart-assed humor. It would have been, more importantly, a way of letting his friends know he was thinking of them. If there were a way for him to bid us all farewell “from the other side” then this was the sort of thing he might have done. As if the message were, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Wherever you are, little brother, I only hope you’re having the time of your life. Happy birthday.