Well, one reaches a time in their life or more accurately an age, when birthdays cease to mean what they used to and they become more of a reality check, that no, time hasn’t stood still for you, why should it and you are in fact fast approaching double digits of the most horrifying kind. And though you may like to think that you are ‘young at heart’ other body parts are certainly considerably older.
It is at this time when one is perfectly happy for a birthday to come and go discretely and preferably unnoticed. But why should anyone be lucky enough to be perfectly happy?
And then there are some surprises that are though surprising, pleasantly acceptable, like people who should absolutely and definitely not have a clue as to when your birthday is, actually call up and wish you a ‘happy one’. Then there’s the peculiarity of practically every single person on the list of people you have ever known your entire life actually remembering your birthday; that should have been the big clue, but naturally I was clueless.
Well I worked the grueling 12 hour shift and was pleasantly surprised by an extraordinarily large number of well wishes and had an early night, relieved that my birthday had pretty much been the non event I was hoping.
I awoke the next morning thankful that though I had not been able to escape my birthday, I had certainly managed to get through pretty much unscathed. Or so I thought.
Then a dear friend offered to take me for lunch to celebrate my birthday and I figured that this sort of low key celebration would be fun still keeping in line with being relatively discrete. Well it was a late ‘all you could eat’ lunch and we were quite clever in that we could have very easily have hung around a little longer, let our lunch digest and then actually have an ‘all you could eat’ dinner too. Wow that could have been exceptional value, except that I think we were both going to burst from our overindulging in lunch. So instead we headed our separate ways.
I returned home, surprised yet again by my husband suggesting that he too take me out to celebrate my birthday, (this was actually a multifaceted surprise; firstly that he actually remembered my birthday, even though he was a day late, and secondly that we go out in the first place and thirdly that we actually go ‘alone’). Well the last point was more of a shock really, alone, just the two of us, what on earth would we talk about, and what a shame I had just eaten so much which would make it difficult to keep my mouth full with food to minimize conversation. I certainly tried to include the kids in our plans, but he wouldn’t have a bar of it and it made me suspect that perhaps he had something really special planned. Was it possible that perhaps a single solitary romantic bone had been discovered in his body even after all these years? Of course not, that was just me being totally ridiculous I realized as we headed in the totally opposite direction of all the fancy places and to the hugest most crowded restaurant in the whole of Western Australia.
Well we took a seat and were suddenly greeted by a huge crowd screaming out SURPRIZE! I’m not quite sure how the already extremely full restaurant managed to seat an extra 100 people, but soon we were all enjoying a meal together, and I guess this kind of surprise still manages to border on being an acceptable type of surprise.
Now we get to the not quite so acceptable surprises, like bringing out a birthday cake with exactly the right number of candles and sparklers on it, just so everyone who wasn’t sure just exactly how ‘young at heart’ you were, would now know, as well as at the same time being quite a potential fire risk, especially when the fire warning for the day was extreme. It gets worse; then the entire restaurant is standing up and singing not only “Happy Birthday” but also the seventeen other different birthday and celebration songs including ones in different languages.
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, we get to an absolutely, totally unacceptable type of surprise. Something made me turn my head and to my absolute horror, (not surprise at all) a huge screen has appeared with my name and some baby photos on it. I probably could have survived that embarrassment but then the music starts and it gets extremely worse. The lights have been dimmed and everyone in the restaurant is enjoying (that’s an understatement, killing themselves in hysterics) watching a home movie of ‘me’ in every possible humiliating, disastrous and uncoordinated moment in my life. Cripes! Where the hell did they get some of those photos from?? And surely they weren’t all me. My whole body was red and I was desperately trying to crawl under the table to die, but everyone kept looking at me to make sure it really was me. Well I was trying to work out what would be worse, having enough friends that totally filled the restaurant and there were no strangers, or having no friends and the restaurant was full of total strangers that I would never have to face again. Then I decided that both options were extremely bad as this movie would be embarrassing enough in the privacy of my own home with immediate family only. What kind of friends and family did I have?
Finally it was over so I casually raced over to the bathroom. Naturally, I overlooked the golden rule and you guessed it: there was no toilet paper in the cubicle!
