I’m waiting for a friend to meet me for dinner. We’re celebrating her birthday. While it’s not technically until the next week, she has plans on the actual day and Passover starts on that weekend, so we’re out on this Friday night instead. I’m happy that I get to stretch her birthday out to a full week.
I told her I would pick the restaurant and make it a surprise. I text another friend who goes out a lot for some good suggestions. I end up vetoing all his recommendations for some reason or another until he gets annoyed and gives up. Then I remember a place that my birthday friend and I often passed on our long meandering walks in the summer, and that she’s mentioned wanting to try. So I make a reservation there.
It’s a French-ish restaurant. Fancy enough that we can get dressed up, but not so fancy as to be outrageously priced. While I wait for her, a family sits down to my left. I get the sense they come here fairly regularly on a Friday night, the staff seems to know them.
It’s a small space, I can’t help but listen to their conversations. A pair of who I assume to be brothers are arguing with each other. Another one of their relatives is celebrating his 65th birthday the next day, and the one brother thinks too big a fuss is being made over it.
‘The only big birthdays end in zero,’ he insists. ‘60 is fine, 70 is fine. 65 isn’t a big deal.’
I feel like barging into their conversation Kool-Aid Man style to counter with how we make a really big deal over turning 75. But even more so, that every birthday is important.
And it’s true. I love birthdays. I love other’s and I love mine just as unabashedly. I used to say that as a Jewish kid, I didn’t get Christmas, so this was the only time I could get presents. And I can’t lie, that was definitely part of it.
But I’m the kind of person that will buy something for a friend if I see something I know they would like. There isn’t an occasion needed. And I have friends who are the same. So, it’s not just getting gifts. It’s being able to celebrate someone you love, and tell them how glad you are that they were born. How happy you are that they’re here.
I’m a late year birthday, a November child. When I was still in school, the kids in my grade would turn the next age in succession before me. It would always confuse me a bit, make me forget how old I technically was. And now as an adult, that confusion has only gotten deeper to the point I really have to think about it when someone asks my age.
When I was in Arizona a couple of weeks ago, I was waiting in my hotel lobby for my friend to arrive from the airport. As the early person at any event or occasion, ‘waiting’ is almost a second job for me. It’s made me very adept at making small talk with whoever happens to be around.
While I loiter in the lobby, reading his ‘I’m about twenty minutes away texts’ that are clearly lies, I talk to the front desk staff. We’re going straight to a spring training game once he arrives, so I’m already dressed for it. Including wearing prescription sunglasses.
I apologize to the staff for looking like an asshole wearing sunglasses indoors, but I’ve left my other pairs in my room. As the ‘twenty minutes’ stretches ever longer, I end up getting nearly the entire life story of both guys working the desk. At one point, one of them asks me to ‘guess his age’, after I remark that he’s lived in a lot of cities for someone as young as he seems to be.
‘Guess my age’ is always a dangerous game. Round too low and they’ll know you’re shining them on. Guess close enough to their actual age and they’ll be insulted. I think he looks around 34 or 35, so I say 31. He grins and boasts that he’s actually ‘pretty old’ at 37.
I just laugh and say that’s young. He insists I’m not older than him, and for a second I wonder if I am before remembering I clear him by more than a full decade. I tell him the sunglasses mask any multitude of sins. He insists I take them off so he can ‘really see my face’. I do and he says he didn’t expect my eyes to be that colour. Then says, not entirely convincingly, that we could pass for the same age.
My birthday this year will be the last of my forties. If I think about it too long, I can’t actually believe it. It feels like an outrage, this passage of time. I won’t be able to get away any longer with telling myself I’m ‘not really’ middle-aged. And if I’m honest, I’ve probably already long cleared that bar.
But on this particular Friday night, we are celebrating my friend. We get some sparkling rosé and I make a toast to her. At her insistence, we each get our own dessert instead of sharing one.
After dinner, we walk for a few kilometres to help digest our meal before we head out to the very west ends of the city. Another friend is hosting a DJ set at a bar I’ve never heard of. We take an Uber and probably bug the driver by pointing out the restaurants and stores that have survived that we haven’t been to in years, and pay our respects to the ones that didn’t.
When inviting me to his DJ set, he promised me it was like a ‘dad bar’ and the crowd wouldn’t be in their twenties. He wasn’t wrong. The place was heavily skewed towards dads, and was incredibly chill. I ended up randomly seeing people I hadn’t since at least the beginning of covid, and likelier even a few years before then too.
I’m happy we all still remember each other. I haven’t aged so much as to be unrecognizable, although the blonde hair is a huge difference that gets remarked upon a few times. And we’ve all been aging on the same trajectory, so in that way, we have all stayed the same.
It was one of those perfect nights, when everything goes well, and the spark of the city runs through it all.
A birthday deserves a perfect night. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the miracle of existing in the same time and same place as so many people who I love so much. Every birthday, no matter if it ends in a zero, a five, or a two, three, four, six, seven, eight or nine is a milestone. Celebrate them all. I’m so glad you’re here.