A PERFECT BIRTHDAY

While initially growing up on Walnut Street in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, I knew that my birthday was on the horizon only because a friend who lived a few houses down the road had his birthday on May 9, just before mine. Each year this usually meant attending a birthday party at his house, meaning the anticipation of having to rub shoulders with other small children that traveled to our neighborhood to be at his party like cousins or kids from past places where he had lived, something I never personally looked forward to. Still too young for elementary school, having to get to know and play with strange kids in a festive Lord of the Flies-style gathering with various youngsters coming and going as their parents stopped by was something that I could do without even at that age, especially since many of them I would probably never see again.

During the early 1970s, my Aunt Judy who lived just north of Boston in the town of Stoneham took me to Stone’s department store on my birthday. Knowing that I would be overwhelmed, she told me before going in that I could pick out anything I wanted for my birthday. I had been brought up with a polite hesitancy about accepting money or fancy presents already having the feeling that gifts were conditional to some degree. Instead of leaving the store with something expensive like a new bicycle, I picked out a G.I. Joe helicopter even though I didn’t actually have a G.I. Joe. In offering what was probably a polite second chance due to my questionable choice in selecting the helicopter, my Aunt Judy told me that I could pick out a second present to take home. I added a hanging rubber bat before we went to the register. In essence, it was a financial victory for my aunt, a strategy that I copied years later while looking after a friend’s 4-year-old daughter, bringing her to Toys“R”Us and offering her anything in the store. We walked out with a Barrel of Monkeys.

To celebrate my birthday at the end of the first grade, my father offered to take me and a group of friends down to the U.S.S. Massachusetts at Battleship Cove in Fall River on the Rhode Island border, but the original list of invites ended up including some kids who attached themselves to the celebration while hearing about it during school. Although my desire was to narrow down the list to friends that I actually wanted to spend the afternoon with, my father, as always, avoided confrontation and agreed to take everyone, the day becoming less about my birthday and more about his inability to make his own kid the priority.

Birthdays during grade school could usually be marked based on the birthdays of other kids. Classmates Wally Seaberg and David Fringuelli both had birthdays at the end of May right after mine. While studying the backs of my baseball cards, I was happy to learn that I shared a birthday with Baltimore Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson and New York Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson. Family friend and local fifth-grade math teacher at East Bridgewater’s old Intermediate School, Annette Raphel, also shared the same birthday.

One of the most memorable birthday gifts I received as a kid during my earliest years was a red skateboard from King’s Castle, a toy store in the neighboring town of Whitman, Massachusetts, an item that I had been coveting for some time. In 1976 we were using the newly paved blacktop next to East Bridgewater Saving Bank to skateboard down the steep hill of its new parking lot out onto North Central Street in the busy center of town. I managed to store that skateboard away, keeping it with me for decades until I allowed a friend’s son who was a more modern skateboarder to try it thinking that he would respect the fact that it was 40 years old and a personal treasure. Instead, he took it out with a friend bringing it back scratched, gouged, and basically destroyed after one short evening.

Another great gift I received as a kid was a Johnny Bench Batter Up, a batting trainer with a circular concrete base and a hard plastic ball on a long rod that would spring-load after the ball was batted, the harder the ball was hit the faster it would come back to swing at again. One summer while attempting to coach my sister on the Johnny Bench Batter Up, I made the mistake of standing too close to her swing, her follow-through ending with the Adirondack wooden bat painfully striking me square on the side of the head requiring stitches behind my left ear.

I distinctly remember being in the 7th grade on my birthday in 1981. My desk was directly behind David Fringuelli’s in Mr. Pelati’s social studies class, the seating chart having been done in alphabetical order. The weather was already warm that day, and we were getting ready for the end of school and the upcoming summer. In that class we had recently watched the Space Shuttle Columbia land in California for the very first time after two short days in orbit on a small television that was wheeled into our classroom. Social studies was at the end of the day and we were working on a textbook assignment after listening to a few oral reports done on several states. Mr. Pelati normally honored birthdays in his class by removing the dates from his desk calendar and presenting them to any kid who happened to have a birthday on that date. I documented the calendar page that he presented to me that day with a short description of what we did in class in the lower right hand corner. “Wally just got through doing his report on Virginia, Ala. My Birthday - 7th grade - Mr. Pelati’s 7th period social studies room.”

Years later in 1991 I was living with Maura Mulcahy, a young woman who took birthdays very seriously. I remember working that day as a bellman at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston. When I came home that afternoon to celebrate turning 23 years old, Maura had obviously cooked up a few surprises. The most obvious one was that she had picked up a special rocking chair that we had both seen and liked at Pier-1 Imports. But before we went out for dinner on Route 1 that night, she forced me to work through a series of clues associated with the new chair eventually leading me to finally figure out that, among other gifts, there was now a cable box on top of our entertainment center, the real birthday surprise being that we now had cable for the very first time and she had also ordered NESN meaning I could now watch all of the Red Sox games on television while relaxing in my new chair.

While living in Somerville in 2003, I had what I look back at as one of the most touching birthdays I can remember being presented with a relatively unassuming and inexpensive gift. At one point I had told Vicki Stanton that I really enjoyed teaching the old West, a subject I was responsible for teaching to 8th graders at the time. I had described the West as a kind of magical content area, having always remembered an old book with brightly colored illustrations from the 1950s that always seemed to be around our house when we were kids. I told Vicki that the memorable book was called Cowboy Sam and Pokey. Although we didn’t have a home computer at the time, Vicki used a computer at the nurse’s station while working at Boston’s New England Medical Center to search eBay, relatively new at the time, and was able to find that book for my birthday. She later laughed about it being a significant challenge since she initially spent so much time first trying to find a book called Cowboy Sam and Pokey, the name I had originally told her, while the book’s title is actually Cowboy Sam and Porky. Unwrapping that book on my birthday in 2003 was one of the coolest and most thoughtful birthday surprises I have ever had, as simple and inexpensive as it may have been.

In more recent years it has been dinner at Cape Cod restaurants like Shuckers in Woods Hole or The Ocean House in Dennis, being fitted for fancier clothes than I am normally accustomed to wearing, and books, lots of books - all of which I have read and loved. But simplicity to me rather than money is most important, most authentic, and often most appreciated. Last year there was some confusion when I had to be told on my actual birthday that my gift would not be out of the frame shop until sometime after my birthday, an original painting of Hannah, my yellow Lab, done by Ukrainian artist Olesia Petrov from the nearby town of Mashpee. Although the news was delivered to me with some element of anticipated disappointment, I didn’t see it that way at all. Even better, I thought to myself. To be in the company of someone you love, the recipient of something that requires planning, creativity, and care, while knowing that my birthday would not be over in just one quick day - that we had so much more to look forward to. A perfect birthday.

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