A Happy Birthday to me!! These keep right on coming and the only way to stop them is to die, apparently. Since I am showing no signs of that, I will just open my cards, answer my phone and say thank you. I realize birthday is a good time to look back down the cluttered road of my life and remember birthdays before. Now here is the really sad part, I don't remember them. There is only one birthday that I can actually focus in on and remember it clearly. That was my seventh.
First I want to tell you that over the years I have had husbands, kids, friends, acquaintances, teachers, co- workers, lovers, family and my birthday has never been forgotten. And every card, letter, phone call or personal visit has meant a lot to me. I have been covered in flowers delivered by FTD and the aroma still fills my senses. I love flowers! I hate it when they have stayed past their prime and I have to throw them out and put the vase some where. All of these touched me deeply, but the one 73 years ago will travel with me to the streets of gold!
Mother cleaned houses as a side job and one of her clients was a lady named Paralee who was also a cousin to mom. Paralee was also the neice of Aunt Helen and Uncle Skinny Lang. Not real sure how all the blood lines worked in here, but I do know that side of the family had money. That and the fact that Paralee and her husband worked and only had one kid. On this particular birthday, Paralee wanted to see that I had a birthday party.
I am not sure how many kids from school showed up, but I do know somebody gave me a gift of a cookie cutter. It was red plastic and the design was Cinderella. I was ecstatic! It immediately became my favorite possession. Now you need to understand that growing up in Nickerson without benefit of running water in a house heated with a wood stove was not exactly the lap of luxury. Gifts were few and far between and the cookie cutter joined the Chiquita Banana cloth doll that mom had gotten with coupons saved and then stitched the pieces together by the light of a coal oil lantern. I slept with the cookie cutter and the cloth doll. I dreamed of the day when I could make cookies and cut them with my own cookie cutter.
The dream of the cookies I would make was much like building castles in the air. Sugar was rationed. Since the cow had died, butter was non existent. Store bought "butter" was a one pound block of white grease with an orange pellet that you poked a hole in and then worked it into the white grease so it looked like butter. World War II left an indelible mark on most of us kids back then. Our sole source of information was what we picked up listening to the adults. I know I was too young to understand, but I can remember the jubilation when the war was over and our troops came home.
Some how all the horror of Auschwitz and the pictures of the emaciated bodies of the Jews still lives in the recesses of my mind. The stories that came out of that period must never be forgotten. We must never again turn a blind eye on man inhumanity to man.
And once more, my mind has turned a corner. How did I go from a happy 7 year old at her first birthday to Auschwitz? Could it be that perhaps this is where my passion for lifting the downtrodden comes from? I can clearly remember things that I should not remember. I can hear Roosevelt announcing on the radio "The war is over." I do not think it was actually him since the war officially ended after his death, but memory is a funny thing.
Momma always said that our mind will remember what our mind wants to remember and momma was right. I want to remember a red Cinderella cookie cutter and a birthday party that may or may not have actually happened. So, on my happy birthday to me day, that is what I will remember. And I will see friends that love and care for me. By the very act of clinging to life for 80 years, I have earned my stripes!
So Happy Birthday to me! And rest assured, I am not done yet! I may be the matriarch, but I am still 7 years old in my mind; an innocent little girl aching to grab the world by it's horns and make it her oyster!
Peace and love!
