As I and many of the people I know get on in years, we tend to extend our birthdays.
Usually prior to as opposed to after THE DATE. When you get older, you realize there aren’t many of them left so you take as much leniency as you can squish in for birthdays.
Around about 40 I noticed some of my friends, (Rod,) started to celebrate birthdays for a week or more before the day their mom had delivered them to the outside world with fanfare and some apprehension.
At and around that 50 mark the week-long celebration magically became the “Birthday Month!” There it stays. Any longer and we tend to forget what we are celebrating. But! Yes, a well celebrated “but.”
Within the birthday month there is time to plan the perfect gift to give. Sometimes that perfect one, well turns into three-day old fish.
On the other hand, sometimes, you hit the mark just right.
Sit right back sometime, close your eyes and try to remember the most memorable birthday gift that came your way.
Chances are it won’t be the best or the worst, just memorable. When I turned maybe ten, my sister and mother put a surprise party together for me. I was oblivious to any plotting and planning.
Come on I was ten! Almost ten! One of the gifts I still remember was this ceramic fish. It was very colorful.
The finish had this look of a gold and green and red clam shell. Very lifelike and about as big and round as a fist that was clenched. All pretty, scales painted and iridescent.
It had this HUGE open mouth on it as it sat on the table.
You should know that it was when the fancy F. W. Woolworth store was in downtown Reno, Nevada and it was THE place to shop for gifts and make-up and to get a tuna sandwich at the counter while shopping. So uptown and felt so grown up when I was a kid and got to go shopping there. It was very evident that my new fish came from Woolworth’s. Such a grand Disneyland like place.
Well, a few years went by and I had that fish on my dresser and filled that big ole fish mouth with little girl things. Beads strung a cotton string bracelet. One of the dried sugar flowers that came glued onto a little array of hard sugar flowers, on a five-inch by five-inch pretty piece of card board. Oh, you know.
The flowers that moms used on birthday cakes. Pretty yes. But we all saved a tooth by not trying to eat them!
At that time, I shared a room with my much older sophisticated sister, Shirley. She was all of fifteen. One fine day she and her friend were in our room and I was allowed to stay, quietly. Yes, proudly I was that pain in the you know what little sister.
Mom was gone, house was empty, and those two rascal teenagers decided to smoke cigarettes. I was in awe.
Coughing like crazy in that little room, but still in awe of my big sister. Puffing away all grown up with a Beach Boy album on the record player singing, “And she had fun, fun, fun till her daddy took the T-Bird away.”
When her friend goes over to my dresser, looks at my prized fish and then. And then. And then she dumps out my treasures and uses my iridescent but dusty fish as an ashtray! AN ASHTRAY!
On closer inspection. It was an ashtray. I can still see the misshapen bottom lip of that fish. It had a dent in it that
I though came from probably being caught. I visualized a hook and a line… In reality it was that place on an ashtray where you would lay down a cigarette. You know, to pick up your beer! What a life lesson.
I know that the girl that gave me that fish bought it at F. W. Woolworths because it was pretty. Never giving a thought to the fact that she was buying an ashtray for a ten-year-old. I love that memory. That, that is the most memorable birthday gift I can remember.
So, it becomes a real seek and find, looking for a just right birthday gift to give.
Not every year but on memorable years. Like when a friend, (Dana) turns 65. Or more or less. The gift that keeps on giving is the one that is remembered and mentioned through the life and times of life.
Happy Birthday my friends.
Trina lives in Diamond Valley, north of Eureka, Nevada. She loves to hear from readers. Email her at itybytrina@yahoo.com
Really!