Birthday Party

It’s been a two-week whirlwind of celebration at my house.  I keep thinking about all that has happened and the story that keeps coming to mind is the confusion I sowed with my balloons!

The first party was a baklava open house to which I invited everyone I knew and some people I didn’t know.  I put invitations in Christmas cards which I sent to our relatives and church friends in Albuquerque.  I put out invitations in the teacher’s lounge at school.  I invited the mail lady who has our house on her route and who lives in the house across the street from us.  Mike and I also invited a couple who we met at a restaurant in Corrales a few days before the party.  Turns out that the husband knew Mike’s mom.  Small world Albuquerque in action.  All the invitations openly said that I was making a big deal about my fiftieth birthday.

I asked Sophia to be in charge of balloons to put in front of my house to announce the party location to the world in general and to people coming over for the first time.  She didn’t bat an eye when I requested that there be five or six balloons that said, “Happy 40^th birthday.”  My son-in-law John Ben was confused when he went to pick them up on Saturday morning and called to confirm that my order was right.  I guess he has yet to learn about my trickster side.  Then the people came and my shenanigans worked.

The confusion made me so happy.  I didn’t get away with anything with the people who have known me for decades.  Many of my friends are turning fifty this year or soon and they know that we are the same age. 

My new friend Debra was confident that she knew me. She walked in and said, “You need to go to confession!”

“Why?” I asked.

“The balloons!  I know you aren’t forty.”

I laughed and thought myself clever and silly.

People who don’t know me so well and who judge me on my fair skin and youthful antics weren’t sure what to think.  Many people asked me my age, and Xenia reported that multiple ladies came up to her and asked her if their “Happy 50^th Birthday” cards were right or wrong.

I love that I am ageless enough to make people question how many decades I have behind me. Let’s not talk about the three adult children and grandchild in my life.

I spent the day in the kitchen making fresh pans of spanakopita for each wave of friends.  We also served ambrosia fruit salad and salmon with cream cheese on crackers.  Over the course of the day, fifty guests signed the guestbook and ate two hundred pieces of baklava.  Every so often the house would break out in the song “God Grant You Many Years” alternating with “Happy Birthday!”  I joined Esther and Luba at the piano to sing “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music and sold one copy of Syra’s Scribbles V.  All day long I greeted people who loved me and had the joy of seeing people stay and talk to one another while a thirty-minute photo collage flashed across our big screen television on repeat.  It was a celebration of me.  I spent the day doing what I love best, bringing people I love together, and I smiled the whole day long. Even now I can close my eyes and hear the chatter of conversations taking place throughout the kitchen and great room.  I hear Diane’s laughter, see Mike’s brothers smiling, and smell the bouquets of flowers that turned my house into a garden. I taste the sweet baklava, crisp layers of fillo dough filled with cinnamon sugar walnut goodness dripping in honeyed syrup.

My cousin Ari flew in the day before the big party and entered fully into my life.  As much as I love to share myself through my writing, there are only a handful of people with whom I feel I can be completely myself.  Ari is one of those people.  I was artistic and intelligent and prayerful and playful to my full extent with her, and she loved me as I am.  My kids were themselves too.  They played together and bickered and were sometimes helpful and often not, and Ari saw them for the loving, wonderful people that they always are. 

Ari came to church with us and then went off to a healing retreat.  My sister Ellen flew in on the day after my birthday, and they were both with me the following Sunday along with Kelly and Christa and their kids and Mathew.  After our priest popped in to bless the house, we ate Mike’s beef tenderloin with red wine sauce, sous vide carrots and bread.  For dessert, Sophia made lava cakes to go with the Nothing Bunt cake that was topped with pretty pink princess decorations.  They sang and clapped when I blew out my candles.

Ari flew out on Monday.  I spent the wee hours of the morning on the sofa by her makeshift bed in the great room in a cousinly slumber party and saw her off.  Ellen and I spent her last few days with me in our week of sisterly celebration making each day special with one outing or another, watching Wicked on the big screen, going put-put golfing, and eating out at restaurants.

The half-time show had ended.  My friends and relatives were entertained.  Now comes the rest of my life.  I typed up all the kind words in my birthday cards and made a word cloud.  Next I’ll cut up the cards and college them with the heart-shaped word cloud in the center.  It will be a wonderful reminder of how loved and appreciated I am.  I couldn’t ask a better place for me to be at the ripe old age of forty…I mean fifty.