The Sunday Memory Drawer - Birthdays Past

I don't want to be completely self-serving here, but, then again, this is a blog and that, in itself, is self-serving in nature.

Yesterday was my birthday.

If you just uttered a greeting, thank you.  It was a lovely day and, as usual, I had a great dinner with friends.  That's what the usual annual celebration has become.

Things were always a little different in the past.

Take a look at me in the photo above.  A poor child completely overwhelmed by this birthday turn-of-events.  Am I receiving a surprise gift?  Or perhaps the unrecognized girl next to me is sticking a plastic knife in my gut?  Whatever, there's nothing pleasant going on here.

Yep, there are birthday memories for February 11s gone by.

There are some nice ones.  Like the year that "Mary Poppins" opened at the Parkway Theater in Mount Vernon, New York on my special day.  Mom took me and a couple of school friends to see it on opening night.

There was the birthday year where I came over from school to find my one-and-only dog Tuffy greeting me for the very first time in our kitchen.  I got my very own Beagle.  Forget the fact that my mother and I had been angling my dad for a Schnauzer.  He got a deal from the pet shop he used to deliver heating oil to.  I don't regret having Tuffy in my life for a single moment.

Okay, there were some horrors, too.

There was the year where my college friends all gathered together in a restaurant to surprise me.  P.S., I hate surprise parties.  My opinion was expressed and duly noted by all that evening.

There was all the memorable birthday when a then-girlfriend took me out to a very expensive Manhattan restaurant.  The food poisoning hit about five minutes after we left.  My vomit lined the sidewalks of Greenwich Village.  There is something very ignoble about public upchucking in the middle of a blizzard.

And there were birthday parties like the one shown above.  Hateful little events that were orchestrated by adults without a single thought given to the kid's wants and needs.

A birthday party at that age should have been a grand ole time.  Were some of my neighborhood buddies like Leo invited?  Nah.  Were some of my school pals invited?  Of course not.   

Nope, the guest list were relatives and the children of my mom's friends...none of whom I was particularly friendly with myself.

Yee ha, that's fun.

My cousins would show up and I could feel their pain in pictures that I have seen.  For the most part, they were all several years older than me and this was the last place they wanted to be.  My celebration was pulling them away from looking at photos of Roger Smith and Edd "Kookie" Byrnes from "77 Sunset Strip."  Instead, they were forced to sit with me, who certainly looked nothing like those detectives, especially with that stupid bowtie you see above.

Looking at some of the snapshots, I literally don't recognize many of the kids at my very own birthday party.  We all sat there, smiling aimlessly with crumbs of strawberry shortcake dotting our lips.  You would never see a more disconnected and disjointed bunch.  Nobody wanted to be there.  But, heck, the mothers had a rip-roaring time.

I always got the sense that there was a bit of a competition between the moms over who could throw the best birthday party.  And it certainly wasn't focused on making it a nice day for the celebrant.  Nope, the real ones that always needed to be impressed were the other kids.

I remembered this one year on my birthday.  My mom was once again keeping up with the Joneses...or whatever this other folks' names were.  She decided to lay in a lot of prizes for the requisite party games.  All of a sudden, my mother had morphed into Bob Barker and she wanted to give our guests an opportunity to win the big Showcase on "The Price is Right."  I surveyed the toys selected as prizes.  Crap, this is good stuff.  And, wait!!

My eyes fixated on an almost spiritual image.  One of the winners would get...

The new Willie the Weatherman Colorforms set!

Hey, I want that!!!

It was scheduled to go to the winner of "Pin The Tail on the Donkey."

That winner, I decided, needed to be me.  None of these other lunkheads was going to go home with a toy that I truly wanted.  Not on my watch.

I quickly ran possible schemes through my five-year-old noggin.  How can I finagle this?

Pish tosh, it was oh, so simple.

When my turn came, I simply scrunched up the blindfold enough so there was a sliver of light that got through.  Just enough to see perfectly that ass' ass.

I scored a direct hit.  A Preparation H suppository couldn't have landed as accurately.

"Look, I won!!!"

My mother didn't buy it.

"How did you do that?  You cheated."

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

Well, yeah, I did.  But desperate measures were always used by yours truly when Colorforms entered into the equation.

This Shakespearean drama was playing in front of our party guests.  Come on, lady, just give me the damn Colorforms and we can call it a day.

Reluctantly, my mother bestowed me with Willie the Weatherman.  And I didn't need him to forecast the chill that I would be getting from my mother over the next several days. 

And that was the last birthday party we ever hosted.   Thank God!

Dinner last night:  Sausage mixed grill at Lasher's in Long Beach.