Birthday’s change over time, don’t they? As very young children, we don’t get it. People standing around us, balloons, clapping, everyone’s staring. This cake that’s on fire. No, not fire, candles. And we blow, we’re supposed to blow them out.
Then we start to get it. We get presents, we see cousins we haven’t seen in months. Maybe our birthday is close to our brothers. We start to share the parties. Maybe it annoys us, but most likely it doesn’t matter. There’s this cake and the whole candle thing. Easier to blow them out with our brothers. Maybe we just let them do all the work and still get the same amount of presents.
As time goes by it becomes less of a family thing and more being with our friends thing. Maybe we start a night with our friends and end it in the company of someone beautiful. Maybe we laugh and tease our brothers, maybe we go out for a long drive and say goodbye to summer since our birthday comes so close to its end.
And it goes on like this for many years, the faces change, our face changes. It gets to the point where maybe there have been too many birthdays and they wash themselves out. It’s just another day. Maybe it’s a day we really don’t want to think about anymore because there have been so many and we don’t want to count.
But today, today there’s children all over again. And they’re hugging us like it’s their birthday instead of ours. And they’re seeing aunts and uncles and cousins they haven’t seen in awhile. And they’re teasing them just like we used to our brothers and sister and cousins. And maybe, just maybe we’ll let them help us blow out those candles.
On one condition: we keep all the presents.