Skip to main content

Queen for a Day

                             Queen for a Day



It’s September 5th in New Zealand (still the 4th in the States). My birthday. I thought I might brush this one off. I’ve been grumpy. It’s been six weeks since the Husband got laid off. Neither of us knows what’s next, so we’re living in limbo with my knee-jerk panic and sense of frustration we haven’t figured this out – yesterday.

Earlier this week, I told Facebook: forget my birthday. Changed the setting so no one can attach September 5th to me. Except my family and close friends, including my running mates, who know this day is mine. But why should legions of people online, many of whom I don’t know personally, know it’s my birthday? Who needs well wishes from around the world?  Apparently, me.

I had a change of heart last night and whispered to Fb: “Go ahead, tell my friends about the birthday. Google was going to let the cat out of the bag, anyway.”

I set my alarm for 5:30 this morning. I hit snooze once, popping up at 5:40. I check my phone and see an email alert from my friend, Leanne, whose birthday is close to mine (tomorrow? Gosh, I’m horrible remembering birthdays!). My fellow Virgo is one of the most thoughtful people I know (she’s also a talented TV reporter in LA: http://abc7.com/about/newsteam/leanne-suter/ )

My day’s already off to a good start, since I’m thinking of Suter (we all called each other by surnames at the TV station where we met in Grand Rapids, Michigan). I check her anonymous Facebook profile to see if I can suss out her birthday. The only picture she’s tagged in shows a Superman doll sitting in Sean’s hospital room, plus pictures of Fiona and Finley I’d taped to the wall. Leanne and her then-husband had sent Superman to help Sean heal.

I slip into the next room – a spare bedroom/office, where I press my phone’s meditation app, which is set to chime after seven minutes. It’s about all my monkey mind can handle. During these seven minutes, I listen to the ocean outside the windows, think about what I want my birthday to mean and say nice things to myself. I’m a slightly-less-geeky version of the SNL character Stuart Smalley, who says, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” Unlike Stuart, I do not practice before a mirror.

Gray wisps of cotton wool feather the skies over the Mount beach as I pound the sand for a five- kilometre run. My left knee’s still a grumpy old man – he feels about 84-years-old, while the rest of me feels 24. I’d be in better shape now – at 44 – than I was twenty years ago, if it weren’t for the achy, possibly torn bits of tendon scratching about the inside of my knee. No sunrise run up the Mount this year.

There’s no sun, anyway. Day breaks without the orange fire ball rising from the Pacific. Seagulls skitter at the shoreline and squawk overhead. None of them bombard my head. This is a good sign. I pass a man walking two German shorthair pointers. Another sign. They remind me of my dogs, Greta and Baron, growing up. One dog ran away and the other was hit by a car.

After the run, I’m clambering up the narrow wooden spiral staircase from the garage when the kids yell, “Don’t come up! Close your eyes!”

I drop the empty recycling bin and do as instructed. “Here, put this in front of your face,” says Fiona, holding a newspaper. She walks me to the dining room table and says, “Okay, open your eyes.”

“Surprise!” shouts Finley, Fiona and Pete. The kids motion to the table, while my husband places strips of uncooked bacon into a large pan with surgical precision.

Cards, flowers, a bottle of bubbly, two small boxes of chocolates and a bag with Fiona’s writing sit atop the dining table. My eyes well. Such care and planning to have it all here at seven a.m. I take turns giving my family sweaty hugs. I open the card from Pete first. Inside is a voucher for a white water rafting trip. He listened when I told him, “No electronics. Nothing useful.” Just an experience with him.

Finley’s card includes a coupon for laundry soap, candy, four dollars in change and a 20-dollar bill, which I return to him.



Fiona’s present is a red plush doll made of felt whose stitching is starting to unravel between the legs. “I made it in my spare time,” she says. “I even brought it to school.”

I shower and get dressed while listening to my favorite radio show, "This American Life." The episode called “Back to School” http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/back-to-school talks about how children learn. And how they don’t learn if they grow up with chaos and stress at home. I think about my kids’ early years and develop a new theory: maybe the kids have attached so well to Pete (despite what Fiona says, she adores him) because they felt so much love from Sean. Their father gave them security from birth. Their stepfather will provide stability throughout their lives.

Pete serves me a microwaved egg on toast with coffee and bacon. It tastes like a weekend morning. Like love.

After breakfast, the kids decorate cupcakes for a school celebration. Apparently, today is also the birthday of their mascot, Mountie. Fiona and Finley spread the cupcakes with green icing which they layer with sprinkles, M&M’s and lollipops. I drive them to school. The last glimpse of my small fries is Fiona ahead, Finley walking behind, carrying an ice cream container of cupcakes, wearing a black cowboy hat. They fought about who would wear the black hat.

What else do I want to do on my day? Write. This blog is an indulgence, one I don’t allow myself as much as I’d like. I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast called, “Our Friend David,” http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/472/our-friend-david 
which I pause. It’s impossible to concentrate on my own pithy prose while listening to a genius like (the late) David Rakoff who wrote about chicken poop as “olfactory insult.” I’m sad he died of cancer in 2012 at age 47. Just as I was sad to learn Joan Rivers died today at age 81.

Rakoff and Rivers endure not in heartbeats and breaths but in words. Which is part of this birthday writing exercise. Long after my ashes have blown off the Mount, disappeared over Spokane Falls or dissipated into Lake Erie, my words will remain – for everyone who chooses to read or ignore them. Happy birthday to me – cheers to what we keep: love of words. Words. And love.


 *Note: I downloaded the This American Life app from iTunes for $2.99 and got the whole podcast library.



Comments

  1. Dawn,
    This is Anngele, it's been quite sometime, but I try to keep up with your travels/goings on, as often as possible. I'm the mother of your daughters birthday/hospital buddy, Aurora and Fiona were born within mins of eachother at the same hospital, we've talked on this before. I think our doctors were fighting over the OR even? Lol Anyways, I'd no clue you were a fellow Virgo, let alone pretty darn well close to ten years exactly my senior, hey it's a compliment, so stop! Lol My bday is Sept 18th, so Happy Birthday!! I admire your writing, I too am a fellow blogger and lover of words, writing. I'm also a monkey, like our crazy daughters (somtimes she's so much like me it drives me bonky!) Anyways, so much of this post hit close to home again, wanted to let you know someone heard it, and enjoyed it. Keep up the writing, these make me smile and inspire my own writing.
    Ann

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Murder House

Murder House (MUH-dah House) The deed is done              “I don’t wanna go to the dentist. It’s gonna hurt,” says Fiona. I can hardly deny my eight-year-old the truth, but I can tiptoe around it.             “They’re going to rub medicine on your gums to numb them,” I tell her. “And they can put your tooth to sleep with a needle.”             Fiona gasps, “I don’t want a needle! No!” Oops. I shouldn’t have used the “n” word. Fiona starts her high-pitched screeching if she thinks a needle exists in the next room. When I got the kids immunized in preparation for dragging them round-the-world, Fiona cried as the nurse swabbed her upper arm with iodine. You would’ve thought someone was whacking off her limb with a rusty saw, yet the needle lay feet from Fiona’s body. New Zealand is not the place for dental work for a squeamish, sobbing little girl. I learned after bringing Fiona to a dental clinic during the Christmas school vacation (otherwise known as summer holidays) that sch

Ten Years On

Ten Years On Our ten-year wedding anniversary, Dec 3, 2009 Scattering ashes in Michigan, August, 2010 January 23, 2010 is a date I'm afraid to remember and scared I'll forget. It's the day Sean died. I wanted to write about the weirdness of marking ten years since Sean’s death, but it’s almost too big a task. It’s like straining to hear what my kids are asking from the other room while the kettle is boiling in front of me; like trying to figure out how to build a bookshelf when the instructions are cryptic pictograms.  How to talk about a decade of living, loving, grieving? It’s like a trip to the moon and back ten times and also like a walk to the corner store. It has been a long odyssey and a quick jaunt. What no one can tell you about the years stretching between death and this-new-normal-kinda-life is how your perspective will change. What once seemed important now seems trivial, and the person you were back then is different from

The Affair

The Affair Ohope Beach, NZ I had an affair last week. I’m not ashamed to tell you, either. It was sweet and sad. It made me laugh, cry, sigh and dance in my chair to James Brown and Rupert Holmes. My Kiwi PAHT-nah, Pete, even facilitated the tryst, though neither of us knew what to expect beforehand. Pete watched the kids while I was gone for five nights. Five whole nights.  No kids. No TV. No partner.  I enjoyed a dalliance with my late husband, Sean (though I should write instead, ‘dead husband,’ because Sean hated being late). It happened in a wood-paneled house across the street from the ocean, in Ohope Beach, New Zealand. I attended a writer’s retreat to work on the memoir. I revised six sections totaling more than 40,000 words. In the course of revising- subtracting old text and adding entries from letters Sean had written me when we first started dating, plus journal entries he wrote around the time Fiona was born - I fell in love again. With Sean’s openn