Alas, Another Year

My mother called this past weekend. "What are you doing next Saturday?" she asked.

"Nothing special."

"Would you like to go out for 'high tea'?" [In my head, I hear quotation marks around "high tea."]

"I think I'll pass." I have had many miserable experiences at "tea," a ritual all of my British-lit-loving colleagues practice with glee. We have one anglophile who likes to invite select female professors to her house at least once a year for such an event. These parties are excruciating for me to attend, especially since I always get stuck with silver tongs and the sugar bowl asking everyone, "One lump or two?" during several tours through the house. The last time I agreed to meet someone for "tea," the establishment dressed its employees in floor-length nineteenth-century garb which didn't complement my khakis, polo shirt, and bad attitude. I felt terribly uncomfortable through the whole meal [little food I was served].

"But you said that you didn't have anything planned! If I took you you somewhere else, you'd go then? We haven't celebrated your birthday yet, you know."

Ah, so the "tea" date was meant to be my belated birthday celebration. Of course Mom would want to take me somewhere I had no desire to go. I'm not sure what picture my mother has of me in her head, but it's not an accurate one.

"My Read Hat group went to the new tea shop on Edgewater while your step-father and I were on vacation. The girls raved about it!"

Of course they did, I thought. Pretentious old women would love just such a place. Gosh, Mom, when are you going to get that my interests differ from the ones you and your retiree friends share?

We finally compromised on the Cheesecake Factory, but in typical retiree fashion, Mom requested that we dine at off-peak hours. "You don't mind if we meet there as soon as it opens, do you? I think it's at eleven o'clock. I'll call to see if we need a reservation that early."

"No, eleven a.m. is fine." Anthing she wants if it will get me out of "tea."

I have a bad attitude about birthdays, and it has nothing to do with getting older. I remember when birthdays lost their magic—1976, the year I began junior high school and turned 13. At 4 a.m. of my birthday morning, my father arrived home from a night of disco debauchery to find his bags packed and waiting on the front steps. After a relatively mild fight with my mother [no refrigerators overturned, no pet gerbils smashed against the wall], he said, "So I guess this is it," gathered the suitcases, and left. We lived in a small house, and my sister and I had heard the entire exchange, but Mom just pretended that we were still asleep. She went about the day without ever mentioning that she and Dad had taken the first step toward divorce.

For this Twilight Zone birthday [Had they really split? Had I dreamed that morning? I knew better than to ask.], Mom had arranged a day at a stable where my friends and I could ride horses. She picked up the gang, drove us out to the country, and expected me to behave as if this was the best day of my life. I had never ridden anything except ponies at the fair. I expected to gallop on a horse as beautiful as the Black Stallion. I got instead some old hack, the largest animal there, who insisted on pulling the reins from my unskilled hands and dropping his head to graze. The trainer kept telling me to kick him with my heels, but even if doing so is a time-honored strategy for motivating equines, I didn't have the heart. So I sat in the saddle, sweating so badly in the hot sun that the seat of my jeans soaked through, wondering what my parents' impending divorce would mean. After our rented hour with the horses, my mother hustled all of us girls to Burger King for lunch. That day taught me to anticipate nothing but disappointment on birthdays.

I got a small bit of satisfaction when my father celebrated his birthday last year. When I called to wish him a happy 63rd, I asked how his day had gone so far. "This is the worst birthday ever," he replied.

"Why? What happened?"

"We're supposed to be on a cruise right now, but your grandmother pulled one of her usual stunts."

My father moved Grandma out to Texas two years ago. He set her up in a retirement community apartment where she quickly made friends with a bunch of Baptist Republicans. This gang of Q-Tips [what Elizabeth calls the white-haired elderly] walked to Walmart everyday, where they spent three hours cruising the store and purchasing single cans of off-brand green beans. After the new house was built, Dad removed Grandma from this paradise on Earth [Baptists + Republicans + Walmart = Heaven] to live with him and Step-Mom in the "mother wing." The house is in the country, and although Dad promised Grandma some chickens as pets [she's a farm girl from South Carolina], I'm not sure he has delivered. Alone with no peers and nothing to do, I'm sure Grandma is miserable.

"What did she do?"

"Well, you know, she had one of her 'allergy attacks' right before we left. She was having such a hard time breathing, we took her to the ER. Because of her age, the doctors offered to keep her overnight for observation, which she wanted. So we had to cancel, and since we didn't buy the insurance, we lost all of the money."

"Wow, Dad, that's terrible. I hope that she's okay now."

"Oh, yeah, she started feeling better as soon as it was too late for us to catch the plane to Fort Lauderdale."

Oh, well. It was time Dad learned that birthdays are big disappointments. I learned that lesson 29 years ago and so just tolerate the damn day the best I can.