A belated thank-you to my 11th grade AP English teacher, and ruminations on a birthday

Today is my 30th birthday. To everyone who made the socially appropriate gesture, please consider this my reciprocation.

As a man too much given to reflection, I don’t feel a particular compulsion to think on the last year of my life and take stock. This is not that post. Still, questions abound. What do I want for my birthday? Do I feel older? Do I feel old?

What I want is for anyone who is thinking of doing something for my birthday to do something that makes them happy. I don’t need stuff and I’m not big on the customary social graces. I sent my dad birthday greetings by text message; I don’t need your Hallmark card. If sending me one makes you happy, awesome. If you want to take me out to lunch or buy me a drink, so much the better. I am sure I enjoy your company. If, on the other hand, when you think of my birthday you feel the crush of obligation, allow me to absolve you. I do not want your obligatory gesture. What social cue have I ever given you that makes you think I care? It’ll be just between us, none of your other, more socially responsible people will ever know. And to be honest I will think much better of you. I can smell the stink of obligation, it is rather pungent.

banjo cake with licorice strings

That said, I do like birthday cakes. Especially when they evolve into the purest representation of the absurdity of our birthday conventions. I find myself in a birthday cake arms race of sorts, wherein my friend and I raise the stakes with each passing year. I attempted to make a cake out of fireflies. She made me a banjo. I made a Cylon raider. There have been others. Like any good warring factions, we have assaulted innocent bystanders (with a Rock Band cake). I’m not certain but I think we may have to call a truce soon. We must by now be on the brink of mutually assured destruction.

In most company, on any given day, I feel older than my peers. Well, older may not be the best word for it. I feel as though I stand apart, reserved, beating against the current at a different stroke than most. I feel this especially in the way I speak; even when I try for the casual I come across several levels of decorum higher than the mean. This is especially true of people I’ve just met, which lately is everyone I see, since I just moved. To my new friends (who likely aren’t reading this): I am more ridiculous than you could possibly imagine. I won’t apologize for speaking much the way I write though (and I certainly won’t apologize for the way I write).

I remember reading a short story in high school about a world where the sun only shines once, for only a couple of hours, every several years. The story is set in a classroom on the day the sun is scheduled to appear, and the students are trying to describe the sun, which they’ve never seen. I remember one girl in the classroom described it as a penny, and the other students took offense and, while the teacher was away, locked the girl in the closet, causing her to miss seeing the sun. I’ve talked about the story to a lot of people in the last ten years, and I haven’t been able to find it or remember who wrote it. I thought it might be Vonnegut. Tonight I found it out there on the internets, and it turns out to be by Bradbury. I don’t think either would really mind the confusion.

but most of all they squinted at the sun until the tears ran down their faces; they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion.

“All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury

It’s called “All Summer in a Day” and is even better than I remember. The thing that especially strikes me now is the way the little girl, Margot, is described. She’s a quiet and observant outsider who has seen something none of her classmates can relate to. She’s seven years old and completely alienated. I must have read this in 11th grade AP English, the font of so many formative texts. We read Ender’s Game and Leaves of Grass and the hard Faulkner and the difficult Steinbeck. I want to know if that teacher knew what she was doing, knew that all those bells together struck a resonant frequency so rich and precise that it continues to reverberate today.

I am thankful to have had someone like that in my life. I am often asked, and wonder myself, how I turned out so unlike the rest of my family. I can point to very few specific moments when I consciously chose to go another way, and in any case the question then becomes about why those choices were made. As I catalog the formative experiences of my life, that class, that teacher, that short story, they all go on the list. On my 30th birthday, I know myself just a little better than I did yesterday.