About My Birthday

When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday.  Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!”  But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway.  Around my cake (I can’t help myself:  my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays, which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery, so, never liking to celebrate my birthday, I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake, whose tricky icing always throws my mom) they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” (this is interesting, in a family-dynamical way:  my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow, so she came up with a different tune, “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since, oh, 2006, though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip) and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.

Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays.  My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody (“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer) began to sing “Happy Birthday.”  In our den (picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere) we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless.  Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner.  I hid there then.  If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.

You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood (I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories) and remember how often you were afraid.  In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me.  I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach (I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB) because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked.  I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning (my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB).  I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often (but by no means always) the fear proving the worst of the three.  As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus (I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young).  About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing (and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant) and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.

I used to hide from bullies, too.  I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously.  I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood:  we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak (believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic).  If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe.  But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I:  we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.”  I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match.  I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.”  When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance (in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots), but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard.  I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him.  Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid (when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us) rushing out the front door to see what was the matter.  And this was by no means an isolated event:  our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly.  We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched (today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate) and ending up on our front porch, crying.

Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid (one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too).  When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events.  In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse.  She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective (though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue) describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually.  And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death (though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time you understand after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom?), dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch.  I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.

As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms:  the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day (if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday).  Over the years (and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her) I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest (and honestly I’m trying to be honest here), reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death.  I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin.  I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die.  In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.

Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?”  I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul (too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.) and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture (by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sounds more like composting).  Scripture seems intent on reminding us that were are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside.  Except for a very few places (and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind), Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath.  So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust.  That’s all orthodox (at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right), but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.

Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die (reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense).  Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today (if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this).  Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times (and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God), I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious (though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life though very few outside the scholarly study of religion understand this more positive sense of "piety").  During that period in college, I had crushing doubts (my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period) that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true.  And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings (best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated) of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.

At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry.  Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television (believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death), when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely.  I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before.  The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying.  Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists (and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse) God may have a beneficent interest in me.  Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility (I certainly did not consider this a probability), that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally.  But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread.  Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair.  I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying.  I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith (though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may).

So I don’t like birthdays.  Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I.  Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it.  And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less (again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”).  So I refuse to cooperate.  I fear to do otherwise.  Thank you for reading.