One plus a whole lot

I'm fairly ambivalent about my birthdays. I have a friend who's Dutch, and in the Dutch tradition you throw your own party: make a pie, call your friends, invite them over for your birthday, play hostess and clean up when they leave. Apparantly, once you've been invited to a Dutch person's birthday you're entitled to show up at their place on all their future birthdays expecting cake and coffee. Even though she was hugely pregnant, P invited us - her girlfriends, we who call ourselves the Ladies who Lunch - over for her birthday.

I'm not doing that today.

I used to make if not a big deal than at least a festivity out of my birthday, back in D.C. with my Gang of Four. We always got together to celebrate eachother's birthdays, and some years we did it up big - the year my friend B used his frequent-flyer miles to present our friend R (not husband R, a different R) with a round trip business class seat to Australia comes to mind. I kid you not, Australia! Yes, once upon a time we were all about the birthdays.

Since, oh, turning 30, I've pretty much tried to let my birthdays slide. The past few have been memorable, for reasons having little to do with my birthday. Three years ago today R and I drove beneath the Roosevelt Arch and entered Yellowstone Park, fulfilling a childhood dream of a winter visit after all those summers. We drove straight to the Lamar Valley, where I’d read the best wolf-watching was to be found, and on my birthday I saw my first wild wolves. One was black, the other dark grey, so they stood out in sharp relief against the February snow, and they were running down a distant hillside. Over the next week not a day went by we didn’t see some member of the Druid Peak Pack – one day we saw wolves 18 times, though they were not 18 distinct wolves – often at a distance, sometimes at close range. Yes, that was a good birthday. Two years ago my brother and his family were visiting us and I spent my birthday with blood relatives for the first time since, I think, high school. Last year I was in the hospital with a three-day old son in my arms. My own birthday was pretty much overlooked in the Small Boy afterglow, but I didn’t care. I’m not so much about my birthdays anymore.

And today? Today R took the morning off work and sent me out of the apartment. Time alone with my computer and a latte and no Small Boy; much as I love him, time alone is a precious gift. And tonight Grossmütti will baby-sit and R and I will go out to dinner. And then I’ll come home and go to sleep, and tomorrow I’ll wake up and it won’t be my birthday anymore.

And that’s just fine with me.