another birthday passes

canon digital rebel xsi

Today my Mom would have celebrated her 60th birthday. She died just shy of her 50th birthday. It feels odd that there have been these ten years of birthdays she has missed. You see, the dead don’t age. My Mom will always be 49 years old.

One of the things I often got my Mom on her birthday was a Van Gogh calendar. It has only been during the last couple of years that I stopped searching them out in bookstores and stationary stores. I never bought them, but would often find myself looking them over, trying not to cry.

Another birthday tradition of long ago was going to the L.A. County Fair. The last weekend was usually near my Mom’s birthday, and we would hop into the car and trek to Pomona, usually returning with an oversized stuffed animal my sister would somehow always manage to win.

There was one year when we returned to discover our dog, a black cockapoo named Scooter, was very displeased that she had been left out of the festivities. It would seem she decided to have a little pity party on her own.

As we walked inside the house, we were greeted by a trail of garbage that she had managed to drag from the kitchen across the entire living room. Once we passed the garbage, we found my Mom’s present, a cactus plant, dug out of its pot, dirt all over the floor. By this point my Mom was ready to strangle the dog. Then she saw her cake.

We had left it on the kitchen table. Scooter had managed to get up on the table, and licked most of the chocolate frosting off the top. My Mom wondered how the dog had managed to get up on the table.

This is when one of us confessed that sometimes when my Mom didn’t come home for dinner, we would let Scooter eat at the table. Now my Mom wanted to strangle us. We were sent to our room, with the dog, before she did. Well, as soon as we cleaned the mess up, of course.

It is hard to imagine what celebrating my mom’s 60th would have been like. There are so many if’s in the equation. Would she still be living in San Francisco? Would we have gotten together? Would we have gone to the Fair? Or maybe Disneyland? Would she have been sober?

Birthdays were a big deal to my Mom. She always tried to remember everyone’s. She sent cards, or at least called. She often left messages of her singing, “Happy Birthday” on people’s answering machines (my own included).


on the night stand :: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger