The Day

I get especially reminiscent around my birthday.

Here’s the weird thing about age: somewhere in my head, I’m still in my 30s, though I’m not sure why that particular decade stuck. I could find something outstanding about every decade I’ve spent on the planet. Maybe my 30s were when I felt I had finally hit my stride—although, come to think of it, I could probably make the same argument for my 40s.

Maybe there comes a point when the years keep moving forward, but some part of you simply decides to stay put.

I’m not pining away wishing I were 35 again. Well, not entirely. Who really wants the extra creak in the joints—or the mysterious redistribution of weight that I had just gotten used to being exactly where it was? A fascinating phenomenon.

There are certain things about getting older that no amount of wisdom quite compensates for.

But when my birthday comes around, the passing of another year isn’t what moves something deep in me. Believe me, that comes with its own complicated set of emotions. What I’m referring to is something different.

It’s the feeling that, out of all the days on the calendar, this one belongs to me and me alone.

It borders on the magical—the same feeling I get every New Year’s Eve, when an ordinary turn of the clock somehow feels like a threshold. Nothing has really changed, and yet, for a moment, everything feels different.

That’s what I remember most about birthdays past. Not the presents, but the feeling that, of all 365 days on the calendar, one had been set apart especially for me.

“Psssssst…this one is yours,” the calendar whispers.

Of course, my actual “birth day” is one I know only through stories I’ve been told so many times that they have somehow become my memories, too.

It was August, during one of those oppressively stifling heat waves when the city of Trenton felt like it might simply melt. The doggiest of the dog days of summer, it was. No relief anywhere. My mother, very pregnant and very uncomfortable, was apparently feeling every miserable degree of it.

There was no breeze. Neighborhood cats and dogs were draped about like tiny carpets, lying languidly wherever they could, trying to draw an iota of coolness from the concrete. Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” was on repeat on the AM radio—which, considering the circumstances, seems almost too perfect to be true.

Then came the labor pains.

Off to the hospital they went, certain that this was it.

It wasn’t.

“Not ready yet.”

Back home.

Back to the heat.

Back to waiting.

And pacing.

And then there was Delphine.

Delphine sent Nello to the butcher for the freshest chicken that side of the Delaware River so she could make a pot of soup—what she apparently considered the obvious cure for everything that ailed you.

Chicken soup.

In August.

During a heat wave.

For a woman in labor.

I cannot.

I have always loved that part of the story. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the absolute conviction that no matter what was happening—cold, flu, heartbreak, childbirth, record-breaking temperatures—somebody needed to make a pot of soup.

And not just any soup.

Apparently, it required the freshest chicken that side of the Delaware River.

Eventually, of course, I decided I was ready.

And that Sunday became my day.

As early as I can remember, my mother would wake me on my birthday with extra hugs and a shower of kisses, tickling my neck until I laughed so hard I was breathless.

“It’s your day,” she would say between kisses. “You can do anything you put your mind to. The sky is the limit! The world is your oyster!”

As I contemplated what a saltwater mollusk had to do with the world, my father would round the hall into my room, serenading me in his pretend opera voice, reserved for special occasions—or moments when maximum public embarrassment was required. He was often festooned with a hat or tiara or something else that made me howl with laughter.

Before there was cake, before there were presents, before anyone arrived for the party, they had already made the day feel different.

And they did it with the simplest things—the very things, it turns out, that I would carry with me all these years later.

After his dramatic aria, Joe would get right down to the business at hand.

“What does my kiddo want for her birthday breakfast? I’ll cook.”

Bonnie would shoot him one of her violet gazes.

“And wreck the kitchen?” she’d admonish. “I got this.”

My father would wink at me as if to say, This is what I intended all along.

I remember the frilly party dresses bought at Small World on Hamilton Avenue or Janice Lightman’s in Morrisville. I remember relatives and friends gathered inside the air-conditioned house or braving the heat for a pool party in the backyard. There were cakes and games and party hats and presents—and that delicious childhood excitement of knowing all of it was happening because it was your birthday.

I loved every bit of it.

But beneath all the fuss and celebration was something even more intoxicating: the idea that one day out of the entire year had somehow been set aside just for me.

One singular day.

Mine.

All these birthdays later, I confess that I still wake up feeling the day is a bit more special. As though, for this one day, a little circle has been drawn around my name on the calendar and the world is saying, “Today, we remember you.”

Maybe that’s why I remember everyone else’s birthdays now.

It’s my superpower.

Dates stick in my head. Birthdays, especially. Somewhere along the way, I came to believe with all my heart that the people close to me should be celebrated.

That comes from Bonnie and Joe.

It’s something my parents gave me without ever saying it out loud. By making my day feel so important, they taught me to make the day important for the people I love. Remembering someone’s birthday became another way of saying, I’m glad you’re here. You matter to me.

So I remember.

I call. I send the card. I send the text. I make sure the people I love know that someone noticed their little square on the calendar.

Because everyone should have that feeling at least once a year.

As the years pass, I understand that more than I ever could as the little girl in the frilly party dress.

The presents disappear. The cakes are eaten. The party hats get thrown away.

And the people around the table change.

Some are no longer there. Others have taken their place. And, if we’re lucky, the number of candles becomes slightly ridiculous.

This is what I’m really nostalgic for when my birthday comes around each August. Not being younger. Not the presents. Not even the parties.

It’s the feeling of having one day on the calendar that belongs to you. One day when the people who love you stop for a moment and say, in a hundred different ways, “We remember you. We’re glad you’re here.”

Because after enough birthdays, you begin to understand that being remembered may have been the gift all along.

And when my birthday arrives, no matter how many have passed, some part of me still wakes up as that little girl in the frilly party dress—my mother kissing and tickling my neck until I can’t breathe, my father somewhere nearby singing opera badly.

And for one day, that little square on the calendar pops off the page again.

Mine.

Just mine.

Danielle Barber

Author’s Note: This blog supports a memoir-in-progress. The essays published here stand on their own and do not represent the full narrative, which continues to unfold.