Word: birthdays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been talking about my twenty-first birthday for months. Each twenty-eighth day from July to October was a chalk mark in my cell of illegality. Fumbling with IDs which couldn't possibly be mine; hastily memorizing "I live on Cedar Lane, am 5'11," and August 6, 1975 makes me twenty three" and explaining to bouncers that the airport in Toronto had lost my luggage and "of course my passport, too...doesn't that suck?" would be a thing of the past. I would be allowed to drink as myself. I could wear what I wanted to bars...
October 28, like January 1, December 25 (I am Jewish, but that just makes it worse) and December 26 (Canadian Boxing Day), had always been an anticlimactic experience. But because this birthday would be less a fleeting blur of metallic balloons and singing cards than a crossing over into the world of the initiated, there would be no disappointment. The "day" was not the important part of this year's commemoration of my aging; 21 was the gift that would keep on giving...
There was no let-down. I was as cheerful and self-satisfied as George Steinbrenner at his ticker-tape parade, chirping to anyone who would listen that it was my twenty-first. But I was wrong in believing that the day of my birthday wasn't the important part. I had falsely prophesied the source of a birthday's specialness. That specialness is born of the specificity of time, from an understanding that time is not like water, fluid throughout and a means of carrying me with its current from here to there. Time can be a destination...
...inform the temporal map through which I navigate my life. Twenty-eight is one signpost, autumn another and the paragraph on Scorpio in Cosmo's horoscope a third. That's why I have a responsibility to reconfirm this arbitrary meaning for myself each year by celebrating on my birthday no matter what reading, what thesis, or what application is waiting...
...requisite 21-rituals in a timely fashion. I scurried to Grafton and ordered a margarita (how festive!). I visited the Pro and asked for my special birthday discount (10 percent) to replenish the emergency reserves formerly built up by my older roommates. I went out to dinner and decadently ordered enough courses to make Nero blanch. I lingered in Grendel's downstairs and I didn't care that I woke up warm and peaceful the next day well into my section taking place far away in the Barker Center. I was new and older. The boundaries marking my passage...