Birthday 2025

Birthday 2025 / Three stories about friends

 

Years ago, I had a friend. "Audrey." She was beautiful and rich. I loved her.

 

She invited me into intimacy. At least I thought she did. She said the kinds of things to me that I would not say to another person. She said very frank, unflattering things about her children. Her husband. Her lovers. Her parents. Herself. Her own medical history. I thought, wow, we are really friends.

 

I confided in her, too.

 

I clearly remember one day, many years ago. It was a bright, sunny, unusually warm, October day. I was standing by my window, and I was crying.

 

It was my birthday.

 

I'm used to spending my birthday alone.

 

But this year, I thought I had a friend. Her. I was so foolish. All week before my birthday, as I reached into my mailbox, I kept anticipating feeling the card that I would receive from Audrey. I waited for the phone call. The plan of what we'd do.

 

Nothing.

 

When she had confided in me, I had confided in her. My birthday is hard for me, for reasons I don't need to go into here. Just one of the reasons is that it is the anniversary of the death of someone special to me – special to many people. He was killed in a car accident. He was not the driver. He was beautiful and young. I was the last person in the family to see him alive. I remember him coming down the stairs, pausing, right across from me, at the kitchen sink to take a drink of water. I admired his back. He was wearing a fine shirt, a date-night shirt. He turned and walked out the back door. For years I dreamt that at that moment, I jumped up, ran to the back door, grabbed the handle he was letting go of, and stopped him, and said, "Don't go."

 

But I didn't do that. He did go. And he never came back.

 

Well, there's that. And my birthday is hard for me for other reasons, as well.

 

So, yeah. When this beautiful, rich woman convinced me that I had a friend, I confided in her about this, and I assumed that she'd get it, and at least send me a card. And so I stood by the window on an unusually warm October day and cried.

 

I never want to feel that way again.

 

After a while, I think she got bored with me, and she ghosted me. Audrey won't ever make me feel that way again. Or maybe we'll run into each other and I'll be the proverbial Charlie Brown with the football all over again.

 

***

 

Here's another story about friends.

 

I used to phone S. regularly. I have phone phobia so that I used to call him so often is testimony to how comfortable I felt with S. Once I phoned him on Thanksgiving. His wife answered the phone. She said that S had gone for a walk by himself. She said that Thanksgiving was always a hard day for him. He had grown up in an abusive home, and Thanksgiving brought back memories, and drove him into a funk. So he was off by himself, trodding the hilltops. Something about how M described her husband's solitary trek made it all sound so Byronic. I immediately imagined a woolen cape flapping behind him against the storm-lashed sky, as he paced the moors, alone with his grief, except of course for his trusty Irish wolfhound, named Pilot, or Hound of the Baskervilles, or something.

 

This all happened over thirty years ago.

 

To this day, I am still super careful around S on Thanksgiving. It's a hard day for him. I want, at the very least, not to make it worse for him. He and I are no longer close enough for me to step up and address all this directly, to try to offer him TLC. But in my heart, I do. I think of S every Thanksgiving. I send him silent vibes of TLC. Because I care about him. Because it's a hard day for him. Because someone told me once, one time, that Thanksgiving is a hard day for S, and I never forgot. I penciled it in to my internal date book.

 

I did this because I care about S a great deal.

 

***

 

I know that some people erect unbreachable barriers around friendship. You don't support Trump? Blocked and unfriended. BTDT, many, many times. You support Israel / You are poor / You are black / You aren't cool. We can't be friends.

 

I don't do that.

 

I’m not saying, here, that if someone doesn't send me a birthday card that I would cut them off as a friend.

 

I'm saying that when Audrey didn't send me a birthday card that year, I recognized that she and I were not friends.

 

***

 

I never thought I'd live this long. That's part of what happens when your brother dies young on your birthday. The last line of his obituary was, "The man lived in this area all his life." I'd show them, the bastards that cheated us again and again. I'd travel. I'd see the world. I'd do risky things. Live fast, play hard, die young, leave a good looking corpse. That last is no longer an option for me.

 

When Antoinette was sick, I asked God to take me instead of her. She had so much to live for. Husband. Children. A home. Retirement benefits. Me? None of that. God didn't listen. The bastard.

 

So here I am, it's 2025, and the hard day is coming around again.

 

***

 

Through Facebook, I have reconnected with a kid I used to know in our small hometown. She has matured into a very kind woman. We don't talk at all. She never comments on my posts and I just generally "like" hers. But she is kind. Big heart. She sent me a card. I was so touched.

 

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to spend two days at St. Mary's by the Sea, a blessed refuge for women dealing with cancer. To my great surprise, they sent me a hand-written birthday card! I don't even remember telling them it was my birthday.

 

Almost forty years ago, in Poland, I met one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. T. T and I were constantly together. We traveled to Bialystok together, in a fun but unsuccessful effort to see if we could discover anything about my family, which was from a nameless village nearby. We saw European buffalo together; we met survivors of Nazi slave labor programs, a peasant couple who put us up. After their exploitation in Poland was over, they walked back to Poland, barefoot. God bless those two people! T and I got on the wrong train together. We were together on Dyngus, and one of us got drenched. T met the love of her life, as I looked on. The only creatures I've ever met that are more adorable than T are puppies and kittens.

 

But time marches on. We haven't seen each other in years and we haven't kept up. But she sent me a birthday card this year. That meant so much.

 

Another wonderful woman says she sent me a birthday card. I never got it, but I'm touched that she sent me a screencap of the card.

 

***

 

And then there's this. Someone, who would like to remain anonymous, did an amazing thing. X looked up where my brother, father, and mother – they died in that order – are buried, all in the same grave. I was here for all the deaths, and two of the internments, but I wasn't really paying attention to the location. Feh. Someone could pick me up today, drive me to my next doctor's appointment, and I would have no idea where I am. If someone else is driving – even if I'm driving – I'm not spatially oriented.

 

I remember green grass, and trees. And that's it.

 

And then X offered to take me there, on my birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of Phil's death.

 

Okay, I said.

 

Problem: A nor'easter was due to arrive on my birthday. So we went the day before.

 

I've never visited the grave of a loved one in the US. In Slovakia, once, I visited Uncle John's grave. That's it.

 

I like walking through cemeteries, but other people's cemeteries. I like them for the grass, the quiet, and the statuary, not for any connection. I have willed my own body to science. Once the spirit leaves the body, that's it. The physical remains are no more alive than the dead skin, loose hair, shed blood, exhaled breath, clipped nails, and other unmentionable stuff that our bodies discard daily. At least that's what I think.

 

The sky was gray and cloudy. There was some drizzle.

 

I noticed immediately that the cemetery where my family members are buried is for poor people. All the markers are flat, at most simply adorned stones flush with the surface of the earth. The cemetery is not well maintained. The ground is uneven and many stones tilted or sank. These stones, including my family members' stones, will soon be swallowed up by earth and time. Maybe this will become, like the rest of New Jersey, a strip mall.

 

We had to walk around because we didn't know the exact location. This is a Catholic cemetery and I read many Polish, Italian, and Irish names. And then I read "Goska."

 

My mother's name isn't even on the stone. There really isn't room. Just my brother and my dad. Birth year, death year, not the exact dates, dates I know all too well. No quotes. No carvings. No memories.

 

I called to X. X, who was conducting a search in a different section, approached.

 

I don't know why I've lived this long. It all seems pretty pointless. And it ends, at least for these three members of my family, like this. I'm guessing that no one else has ever visited their graves. Maybe Antoinette? I can't ask her.

 

What's the point?

 

I stood there, on the uneven ground, under the drizzle, staring at the stone beneath me. I didn't feel anything special.

 

I talk to my father regularly. He was a terrific driver. When I have to merge onto a busy highway, I ask him, out loud, for help.

 

I try not to think about Phil too much, because when I do, I cry. Just once a year, on my birthday.

 

My mother … every time I look in the mirror. Bake. Clean. Wish she had left some of her writing with us. She was so damn talented. The stories she could tell.

 

But this stone, and the bones and ashes – my mother, the latecomer, had to be cremated to fit – no, none spoke to me.

 

X, not I, had purchased red carnations. X had no way of knowing that that's a very Polish flower. I placed the red carnations on the stone.

 

X and I moved on.

 

X bought me pizza. And X brought me flowers.

 

The next day, my actual birthday, I read the latest Nazi book, and worked on a review of it, and ate leftover pizza. And I did not cry.