Birthday Memories
My sister and I had birthdays five days apart, born in different years of course. Some years, my parents would make the effort to give us our own days, our own cakes, our own festivities. And some years, due to both of them working twelve hour days, they’d fling their hands up in the air and consolidate everything from the cake to the friends we invited to the festivities we did.
On only two occasions did our grandparents, aunts or uncles visit our remote town in our youths. Only slightly more often did our mom consent to a birthday party with a few neighborhood kids. More often than not, as our birthdays fell just as the end of the school year arrived, our parents would arrange a small weekend of camping (tents in our early years, a camper as we grew up and our parents wanted more comfort) somewhere in the region.
Our mom was fond of giving us presents in the form of clothes, which are bad enough to receive during the Christmas holiday, even more devastating to receive during a party surrounded by our peers; “You got birthday SOCKS, LLAAAAAAAMMME, BWAHAHAHA…” I remember the two of us asking for Barbie dolls one year, and a family member sending us cheap knockoffs with hollow plastic legs that squished rather than bent, as they did not articulate.
More often, we had a day of swimming at the only facility in the area, an open-air pool fed by thermal hot springs, smelling richly of sulphur. Or we’d go out to the ocean beach, throw rocks into the water, and climb all over the huge sunbleached logs. We’d get a rare meal out, usually consisting of burgers, fries, and a milkshake. Sometimes we’d make sandwiches, bring a bag of potato chips and a liter of cola, and make a picnic of it. Once in a great while we’d travel to our grandparents’ homes and celebrate there.
I usually chose chocolate cake; my sister had a thing for banana cream pie. We tended to get the same things, as our parents and relatives would buy two of whatever they thought we’d like. One particularly fabulous year we each got a cassette player and radio, and each of us would play our own music in different parts of the house: me with my Weird Al, she with her Madonna and Wilson Philips.
Because our birthdays were near the summer solstice, most of my birthday memories regard the worship of the sun, playing out in the front and back yards. I remember one particular birthday in which my sister and I made this monstrous fort of lawnchairs on their sides, pillows, cushions from any padded piece of furniture we could find, and blankets clothes-pinned over the top for a “roof”. We’d often sleep outside on those nights, the two family cats wandering through to visit our bizarre structures, our mom yelling at us in the middle of the night to stop wasting flashlight battery power. Later when we got a cheap, bona fide tent, we’d sleep out back for weeks after school let out.
All of these memories are making me nostalgic for all that I’ll miss when my birthday arrives this weekend. *smiles*
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I’m participating in my own meme, heh, Monday Memory. I decided to go for the option of freewriting about birthdays in general.
