My Obligatory Reflective Birthday Post

There’s a photo I use as my profile picture every year on my birthday.  It’s from my 5^th birthday as I’m about to blow out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother made.  I usually leave it on my profile for a week then swap it out for whatever 1920’s sepia toned starlet has a pose reflecting my mood the week after my life calendar has turned a page.  

I forget about the details of that picture… and then study it again a year later.  Everything about it fascinates me.  The fact I had such a little body.  The little body of my cousin next to me (who is a very close resemblance to her now little girl of the same age).  The blurred image of my great aunt in the background.  The blurred image of my grandmother’s crossed legs next to her.  The labels on the ketchup and mustard.  The circular ice cream container.  The lawn on which the table is set.  A frozen moment of 1980 when I turned five.

Of course, that was scanned onto the computer, taken in a time when the instant of a photo was the fact my father’s black camera could press a button and then easily slide the film along to the next frame with a push of the thumb.  I don’t know if that made more thought in the moment captured.  Or if it was more of a lottery because its clarity wouldn’t be revealed until a week or so later when the developed film was available at a kiosk.  But it was a moment captured nonetheless.

I like looking at pictures from the past.  My past and people I don’t know.  Looking at those details in the background and foreground.  Trying to piece together a story of that moment.  I spent some afternoons this winter going through pictures of my grandparents’ cellar parties with my grandmother.  I learned the names of people and the behaviors of older relatives I never or barely knew.  I loved the images of furniture I recognized from the attic or the pinup gals by the bar.  I saw a generation that was long gone before I was born.

I am also a sucker for those photo books of town histories they sell in practically every store in MA.  I have one of Barre through which I gaze and stare to understand the setting of my current novel.  Then I don’t feel so dopey using a tired story-telling device when I have a present day character looking befuddled at the past pictures of one of the book’s other narrators.  Because, really, it is a fascinating mystery trying to unravel and piece together all the people and emotions as well as the fixed details of time and place with the branding on objects or fashion on bodies.  A fascinating snapshot of the all too quickly passing of time.

I think how young everyone looks.  Before life and time has changed and weathered us.  I think of my invisible mother, who made that cake from scratch.  Of my father taking the picture.  They were both younger than I am today.  Of my grandfather who was there and probably on the other side of the house smoking a cigarette.  Of all my other cousins at that party… all the ages of their children now.

How happy my five year-old self is in front of a chocolate cake.  Not worrying about sugar or calories.  Unaware of the childhood cruelties to come along in a few years.  Not yet thrilled by the addition of a little sister.  Just a very happy little girl, when birthdays were a day of being special.  Not a day of being older and further away from the possibilities that were taken for granted just before a few blinks of the eye.  

I’m not going to have a birthday cake today.  I won’t have a candle on which to blow out my wish.  (And that is a deliberate choice to avoid sugar – not a woe is me bemoaning).  But I do have this picture to look in the mirror of the past.  And somewhere in that reflection of ghosts is an understanding of who I am, who I’ve become in the 32 years since.  Of where I still want to go.  And what I hope to hold onto.  Not the cake or the innocence lost.  Just that moment before taking in my breath and concentrating on a wish of things to come.  The hope for something great to happen.