remembered birthday rememory

I have a secret. If I tell you, I’ll blow my cover. But I think I need to come clean. Here’s my secret: I haven’t forgotten everything.

In my family there’s a kind of collective understanding that I’m the child who forgets, who can’t remember anything, who can’t be relied upon to fill the narrative gaps with anything but literary invention. My little sis, the one with the elephant’s memory (not to mention the elephant’s feet to match), plays the role of official keeper of family memory. She does, in fact, remember a lot. Like what I wore on the first day of junior high. Yes, that’s right, not what she wore on the first day of junior high, but what I wore on that terrifying day. What I never tell her is that she remembers everything from her eyes. She can’t remember from my eyes or my mom’s or my dad’s or my brother’s. We have to remember—or forget—for ourselves. And so here’s what I remember from the first birthday I can still reconstruct in fading hues and sugary sweet tastes:

I think it was my seventh birthday. It could have been my fifth or even my eighth or maybe my fourth. We still lived in a house that was taller than it was wide and we played in a basement with beige carpet and wide sliding glass doors. In the afternoons, the sun filtered in those doors and you could lie on that carpet and let the light warm your face. It was my birthday, like I said, and something very unusual attended this birthday. We planned to play party games, the kind for which you win prizes, and they pile up in little arcade bags. You could go home with a whole slew of pleasure. We shopped for those little packs of jacks and marbles—oh my, do I sound old?—at Toys ‘R Us. This is why I know it was an early birthday, long before my mom and a pal opened a toy store with hefty and “educational” toys. These were anything but: they were cheap and silly. But there were lots of them, one of each for every invited guest. It didn’t matter if you were the first or the last to pin that tail on the plastic donkey. You still got a tube of bubbles. I had it all planned out. That was until something unlikely and— to my mind—tragic occurred. My cousin Alyssia showed up. At least I think it was Alyssia. I can’t imagine who else it could be. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe it was just a girl up the street. But there it was: an extra guest. And you know what that meant: no prizes for me. This birthday was to be my lesson in selflessness, in sharing, in being a considerate host.

But I wasn’t selfless. I didn’t want to share. I hadn’t been read Emily Post. I wanted those jacks and that sidewalk chalk. So this is what I remember from the first birthday I can remember: I cried. I sat out. I didn’t play musical chairs. I cried.

I may not remember what I wore to that party—a mouse brown dress perhaps—but I remember the shame. And I remember with shame. It’s a powerful thing shame is.

This birthday I plan to do some penance: sharing this with you now. Forgive me.