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.