I started the birthday project last June in a fit of memoir-related fury, the desperate, annual self-examination in which I find myself around the turning of my years. In a way, putting all those stories down marked a shift for this blog, away from incredibly biased, useless book reviews and posts about back issues of People Magazine (but don't worry, I'll still keep editorializing about their editorial page as often as I can) and toward a forum for personal stock-taking, a collection of random, lesson-less moments of my little life. It's a shift I've been happy to make and one that I hope people have enjoyed. I hope to compile some of the better-received pieces into something a little more fully-formed.
But for now, a few more sunshine sketches of birthdays past, beginning with a birthday exactly half a lifetime ago.
In June, 1996, I greeted the end of the school year with more relief than ever before. I was a peaople-pleasing brain and as such, I'd always loved school itself, but I hated the incredible social anxiety and constant backstabbery that seemed to plague even such lowly orchestra nerds as me and my friends. Grade ten had been a particularly dramatic year for my little circle, and I was glad to see the ass end of it. The idea of turning sixteen made me excited, however false and pop-culture-driven that excitement may have been. After a year of personal tumult, I felt like I knew where I was going. I knew who my best friends were and I knew who I wished my boyfriend was and I was altogether comfortable with this unrequited love (I was an emotional teenager, the type who preferred some baseline level of delicious misery to boring contentment). I'd planned a party for the evening of my birthday, which would fall on a Tuesday just after final exams finished.
The Saturday before my birthday, my best friend Heather and I did what we did every Saturday: took the bus downtown, hung around on the roof of Jackson Square listening to whatever Sonic Unyon band was playing for free that afternoon (there would come a time when our behaviour on the roof of the mall would devolve into horrifying debauchery but that is a tale for another day). We went to Dr. Disc and bought records I sold later to pay for rave tickets, records like The Hardship Post and the Superfriendz, Tristan Psionic and Treble Charger (back when they were good--gather round, children, let me tell you about the mid-90s). I spent most of my teen years battling depression and various eating disorders, and the past few months had been hard, in a wavy, nebulous way. With the school year over and the summer ahead I was finally feeling more human, more like myself. Heather and I had the kind of wickedly intense friendship that you can only really forge when you're an uncertain teenager who stumbles upon a kindred spirit who shares your crushing love of Douglas Coupland and your absolute certainty that you are so much smarter than everyone else you know and goddammit won't it be good when we get out of this town. It was going to be a good summer, filled with sweaty shows in dangerous all-ages clubs, sunny afternoons at the record store, G1 Driver's licenses.
Heather drove me back to my house on Huxley, where we were going to watch movies and bemoan our existence for a few hours. When we pulled up in front of the house, my parents were both standing on the porch, grinning expectantly. I remember having a flash thought, like, oh god, are they staging an intervention? But the moment passed, and I didn't really think anything of their suggestion that we go to the backyard to check out my brother's new stunt bike (the bike which, incidentally, he'd begged and saved for all year, and also the bike from which he would soon fall during his first tour around the block and sprain his wrist, thereby confirming my parents' worst daymares). As we rounded the corner into the garden, I saw the horde of people, and didn't even have a moment to let it sink in before they all shouted "Surprise!" Someone had a dinosaur of a video camera, and somewhere on an old VHS tape there is mortifying documentary evidence of me freaking out, running out of the yard, then immediately running back in, shaking like a leaf. I'd never been surprised like that before, and I still count it as one of the most delightful moments of my life. It is so comforting to see all the people you care about in one place, especially when that one place is your own backyard.
Heather had orchestrated the whole thing with my parents' help, and it was truly wonderful. She told me later how nervous she'd been as we drove home that evening, how convinced she was that something would go wrong, as something always seemed to. Miraculously, though, everything went right. The sun went down and in the dusky light I opened presents and ate cake and probably drank four cans of Coke--these were the days before boozecan madness, the days when everyone still had to be home by eleven, the days when the after-party was a caffeine-fueled sleepover. As the night got darker we spilled out onto the street out front and I convinced the boy I'd had a crush on for at least a year to help me ride his skateboard. I put my hands on his shoulders and it was one of those moments where you just felt like you were being given a taste of what was coming next in your life, where you were happy to hover for a second, somehow aware that once you crossed over, you'd never get to go back.
Not long ago I dug out the photos from that night and they are as blurry, silly, and poorly composed as you would expect. At the end of the evening my mom took a picture of the whole sorry bunch of us, sugar-high and goofy and smiling like maniacs. Of the sweet faces I can make out, I see boys and girls whom I still count among my best friends, boys and girls who are now married, boys and girls who have survived illness and hardship and uncertainty, boys and girls who didn't. I see the start of a grown-up life, an incredible potential.
The night before my actual birthday that year, I watched Sixteen Candles, like I always did. Knowing I was about to be as old as Molly Ringwald's character filled that viewing with a certain adorable gravitas. From now on, I thought to myself, I will be older than this. I will never go back to this place. I cannot take this with me.
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