Birthday Reflections

Some fifty years ago, I came into this world as part of a matched set.  I am, you see, four seconds older than Melissa, my sister, the other half of our infamous duo who most referred to as just “the Twins”.  It was a hectic morning, by all accounts.  Labor pains didn’t last for very long, so Dad drove like hell to get us to the hospital, twenty-seven miles from the home where I would grow up, where some ‘wicked good’ drugs for my “put me to sleep and tell me about it later” Mom was greeted with a wheelchair and rushed the rest of the distance to the delivery ward.

The Eastern Maine Medical Center was at that point (and only named as much for about four years at that point) not overly large, occupying principally the five floors of the Lucilla Pierce Kelley Building on 489 State St. in Bangor, Maine, and a second much smaller building named for a Robert Haskell where the ‘new’ radiology department was centered.  The former General Hospital was so small that the telephone number to the hospital switchboard at the time was just four digits, 5644, when dialed locally, and had only one waiting room.

As Mom used to tell it, those drugs did make quick work of the pain, and she was quickly in a sleepy state where she didn’t recall much of the event itself that Friday, shortly after ten.  When she did regain consciousness, however, she was quite surprised to see that she was wearing not one, but three wrist identification bands:  hers, and one for each of her two newborn children.  There had to have been some sort of mix-up, she thought.  Dr. Chase had previously done an ultrasound and there was no indication at that time that there were two babies.  It would seem that our hearts must have been beating in sync and we were placed one behind the other at the time so his state-of-the-art diagnostic technology had missed one of us.  (Dad said that he had prepaid the doctor for the birth and after we were born, he got a second bill, which he also paid, all the while thinking that with only four seconds separating us, and given that the doctor himself was surprised, that the doctor didn’t exactly have to do a lot of extra work to merit a second full bill.)  The hospital staff, with the help of The Bangor Daily News twice announced our birth to the larger community.

While the drugs Mom had been given were wearing off in one part of the hospital, Dad on the other hand was out in the waiting room because this was before the days when fathers were invited into the birthing wards.  He was fine with that.  He isn’t much for blood and screaming and such anyhow.  Best to keep the cigars he had bought to share on the occasion nice and safe in his shirt pocket.  “Mr. Wilson,” the doctor inquired as he entered the waiting room in his scrubs.  An elderly fellow rose to his feet and replied, “Yes.  That’s me.”  A bit astounded, the doctor continued, “Your wife has just had twins,” to which the elder Wilson replied, “God, I hope not; she came in for her gall bladder!”  My Dad, the younger of the two Mr. Wilson’s present, rose to his feet and responded through his smile, “This one must be mine!”  He was escorted promptly to Mom’s recovery room.  The elder Mr. Wilson was much relieved.

After a visit with Mom and us two little ones, Dad phoned Mom’s parents to let them know the news of our arrival.  My Grandfather, Gene, already used to the jokes my Dad would tell, was in disbelief, preferring to drive in to the city to assess the situation himself.  There, in fact, had not been a mix-up, and it wasn’t a practical joke.  “Well, Jesus, Marion,” he said to his daughter, “now that they are coming in litters, you’ll have to do something about that!”  (She did, opting for a tubal ligation when it was offered.)  I don’t know where my older brother, Todd, five years my elder, was in all of this, no one has ever mentioned; presumably, he was in school.  He would have been a kindergartener in Hudson that year.  As the day came to a close, and Dad returned home, Mom stayed in a double room, sharing it with Norma Parkhurst, who had only two days earlier given birth to Erica, with whom we would later become reacquainted as classmates in school.  (Mom attended parent teacher’s conferences when we reached the Morrison Elementary School for the third grade and found herself seated next to this woman who was indeed quite familiar and realized that their paths had crossed before!  Mom liked to say that Erica was our longest ‘lifetime friend’ given that we were introduced when Erica was two days old, and we were but a few hours arrived.  Erica’s grandparents, Helen and Bruce, and mine were great friends, all enjoying square dancing in a club they belonged to at the time and during my early years.)

            I have had a number of friends reach out to let me know recently that “fifty is not all that old”, or to remind me that I like the rest of my classmates from so long ago, am starting to show a little gray at the temples—I usually reply that I don’t mind the gray.  I hope it goes white like Bob Barker’s of the Price is Right.  For now, I am just glad there are no jumpers—at fifty, a full head of hair is rare!  (Many of my classmates are now grandparents, so their gray hair and balding may in fact be battle tested!)  More importantly, I got a card and a thoughtful gift from Melissa the other day, in honor of our fifty years (or as some have said recently, our collective century!).  In it, her kind note spoke to the fact that we are again this year, not in the same place so as to be able to celebrate our day together, and that she misses that.  Me too.  This year, though, I will be here in Madison, and she and her husband will be on cruise ship for a well-merited vacation.  The last time, actually, that we were in the same geographic space on our birthday was pre-pandemic, in 2017, about a week after my Grandmother Marie’s passing.  We had brunch at the Countryside Restaurant with Sherwood, Grammy’s husband, and my Dad’s nieces, Terri and Traci and their husbands, before I got back on a plane to come ‘home’ in the Midwest.  I had the fried clams and scallops, anticipating not getting any for a long time given my adopted home’s distance from the ocean.  They were delicious.  Melissa misses being able to share our day, and so do I.

            The truth is, we’ve not had a lot of birthdays shared together since I left for college in 1991.  Life seems to get in the way at times.  In our case, Melissa still lives in the area where we grew up, but in my fervent zeal to get out of Corinth, my hometown, and make a clean break of the bullying and humiliation that was my youth, I have since lived in Vermont, France, Spain, New York/New Jersey, Washington, DC/Virginia, and more recently in Wisconsin.  I have not exactly been ‘the door next door’ for quite a while now.  Like Canadian author Nancy Huston, who has long lived in France, I have compared my life to one lived in exile.  There are upsides to being ‘away’, but also many down ones.  Lack of birthdays spent with a twin, notably one.

I was back in Maine for our birthday in 1998 (substitute teaching in our local schools and giving night classes at the Husson University in Bangor) but even then, we missed out.  It was partly my fault.  We were supposed to have gone out to dinner together that night, Melissa, Mom, Dad, and my grandparents, but after a rather ugly disagreement with my Grandmother who had earlier that day called Mom to tell her to ‘discipline me’ (I was half as old as I am now, at that point, and resented very much that Gram was treating me like I was half again my age then) I refused.  I had informed Mom, along with a few other quite ungenerous thoughts I had had on the matter, that she should tell her Mother that I absolutely would not be attending that dinner.  “I can’t tell my Mother THAT!” she said, rather horrified.  Mom opted instead later that day to lie by omission to her Mother about why I was not there.  Coward. “Suit yourself,” I had retorted, “but I will remind you that you’re the one who always said that honesty was the best policy.”  In her last-ditch attempt to change my mind, Mom gave the best of what she had left in her arsenal to convince me… “And besides, you can’t boycott your own birthday party!” I turned, looked at her searingly, barked, “It is as if we have never met”, climbed the stairs and went back to my room where I played the piano for the next hour or so, until the house got calm and my frustration thawed.  The blocked cords of the Navy hymn never sounded more powerful than under rage.  My behavior was cold, and my anger quite hot.  And so was my dinner.  I set myself to the kitchen to prepare a nice Vindaloo, so spicy that one would have wished to have put toilet paper in the freezer the night before, just like my friend Kartik from India had taught me.  It was delicious and paired very nicely with the Bordeaux that I had purchased for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the D-Day Landings.  Salut!  If I had been smart, I would have made myself an Angel Food cake, like I do every year, but I hadn’t thought that far ahead, I guess.  Plans change.

Since then, no luck for birthday parties, I have been in Wisconsin.  Spring break from teaching and my birthday never coincided.

            When we were little, Mom, as my friends from the time will recall, was gifted at organizing some pretty swell parties.  Some years, they were small affairs with just family, and others there was a party and sleep over—those had to have been long days for Mom!  I remember one year, when we were in grade school, where she had cleaned out the garage/barn which was no small task so that we could have the kids from school join us for the afternoon.  It was still cold outside, I recall, but the snow had finally melted, and the grass was starting to green up around the garden plot still waiting for the rototiller treatment it would soon get.  We had to keep our coats on, at least until we got heated up from the dancing and playing; the barn had no heat source but was very spacious.  It was my favorite of all the parties we had over the years—we turned 8 that year and were near the end of our second grade at the Kenduskeag Elementary.

We wore party hats, really cool ones.  I do love a good hat.  Our guests had, in fact, a selection of three hats from which to choose.  (Mom saved one of each in her stash of memories from when we were small—I have them in a trunk up in the attic.)  There were pointy hats, yellow with plastic fringes dangling from the edges, and a happy clown with balloons in hand, printed on them.  Another was a hat which featured a unicycling, banjo-playing clown all decked out in a pair of pink trousers and a red pinstriped jacket with a blue top hat, and matching bow tie and suede shoes.  That’s the one I chose.  Lastly, there was a yellow hat bearing the likeness of Smokey the Bear, who wished us a happy birthday in the ribbon that wrapped around the head.  Todd wore that one.

            Mom took party planning seriously.  She had mailed out invitations (eleven of them, at eighteen cents apiece for $1.98 in postage) to Sarah Grant, Trisha Dunham, Gabriel Poulin, James Bragdon, Cindy Burleigh, Jenny and Matt McCorrison, and Marianne Tate.  For the nerdy philatelist among you reading along, First Class stamps had risen from the 1978 price of fifteen cents to eighteen in March of 1981; they would take another hike later that November to twenty cents.  The same stamp by 2023 standards is of course sixty-three cents, a 350% increase.  Mom’s invitations would have cost her just under $7 today!  I digress.  Mom had gotten craft pencils for everyone to draw with, and a fresh copy of Pin the Tail on the Donkey which she had hung on the back of the barn door.  To blindfold us each in turn, she used an old bandana that her Grandmother, also called Marion, had given her.  We danced the London Bridges, bobbed for apples, and in two teams, passed a sponge ball beneath our chins from one person to the next, attempting not to drop it and be forced to start over.  There were candy prizes for the games. Full-size candy bars; the snack sized ones like for Halloween had not yet come to be.

For lunch, Mom had brought the picnic table Dad had built in and covered it with a plastic tablecloth which featured blue and pink layered birthday cakes on it.  Photographs of the event showed that at least one kid must have cried at some point, given the lump of ice cream on the floor by the table; said guest would have been calmed and reserved a fresh cone.  Mom prepared homemade baked beans and W.A. Bean’s red hotdogs for the main course.  We had fruit punch in a big bowl with a sherbet mold melting in the center, and for dessert a few kinds of ice cream she had purchased from the Schwans’ man.  She even got a big box of cones to serve it in, just like at the shop in town.  If only she had been able to get the candy sprinkles and crushed peanuts too!  Mom had made each of us a birthday cake; she had taken cake decorating classes at the school in the evenings, so the pair of layer cakes were pretty fancy, smothered in double boiler frosting which Mom was so good at whipping.  Chris McCorrison, Jenny and Matt’s mom, helped chaperone the event so that everything went smoothly.  (Chris is a wonderfully generous soul who still looks in on Sherwood, now in his late 80s and living alone since Gram died.  She is one of those touchstones of my past that I look to in order to remind myself of the importance of generosity and the value of caring for others.)

This year, there won’t likely be party hats or games with candy prizes, but we’re still planning something nice.  Missy and I have spoken and exchanged gifts already, since she won’t be in the country to chat on the phone that day.  Gregory has invited one of our friends, Lisa, to join us for dinner that night.  He wanted to make it a surprise, but Lisa has a bit of a problem keeping a secret, and I am not fond of surprises because growing up a surprise usually meant a situation which led to a foul discussion about how “I needed to learn to take a joke”, with the fact that the prank was decided to be a joke only after my reaction to it.   So instead of a surprise party, it will be coordinated out in the open, I’m promised.  Gregory has vowed to make dinner for us all—likely his baked chicken with the crispy skin that he does well, and some sides.  I will serve it with a 2007 red that I have had stashed away for several years now.  It should be just delicious by this point.  I will also have made myself the Angel Food cake that I enjoy so much.  (We will of course be glad that it won’t turn out like the one I made in 1994, my first birthday spent in Courseulles-sur-Mer with my friend Andrée.  She did not have a proper cake pan, but rather a non-stick bundt cake pan, which allowed the cake I made to rise just beautifully, but when I turned it upside down to cool, as one does, it flopped rather lasciviously onto the countertop and flattened.  I ate it anyway; it was still delicious, albeit quite ugly!)  While I can’t celebrate with Melissa here, I still intend for it to be a very nice evening.  If you see Melissa in town when she gets back from her cruise, give her a hug and wish her a happy birthday from “the other Twin”.  I am sure she will appreciate it.