A Half Century

I turned fifty. It had almost no effect on me at first, but it did after a time. It was sobering. I was half a century old. I guess I’m middle-aged now, I thought. In truth, I’d been middle-aged for a number of years already, but the realization had never quite dawned on me until then. The truth of it was written all over me, though. Grey had been creeping in for years. Aches and pains too, if truth be told. Injury took longer to heal. And I was getting up and going to bed earlier. I’d yet to scream at anyone to get off my lawn, as yet, though. I still haven’t and hope I never will.

The occasion had been marked quietly. Just dinner with Bev. My mother baked me a cake. My mother has baked me a cake for each and every birthday I’ve ever had. But I have never had an actual birthday party since I was a child. And being a December baby, I’d never had a birthday barbeque, or a lawn party thrown in my honour.

I wanted one. If only once.

So, I set about throwing myself a party. I made a Facebook event page, calling it MY 50.5 BIRTHDAY BASH, and set it exactly six months after my actual half century.

I invited most people I knew and liked, those people who’d been my friends for years or in years past, some of those I worked with. Then I sat back and crossed my fingers to see who would accept the invitation. My ego got a bit of a boost when Barb Strum, Bev’s closest friend accepted the invitation seconds after I posted the event. Other acceptances leaked in from time to time. I will not say that the event filled up. I’ve never had a wide circle of friends. Secretly, I hoped that the party I was throwing myself would not be a social shunning. My self-esteem was not at its highest at the time. I even went so far as to invite the toxic friend, offering an olive branch, hoping that it would be accepted, still not sure if our flagging friendship was my fault. Like I said, low point in self-esteem.

I got about thirty acceptances, altogether. Not bad, I thought, chalking it up to my having such a small circle. I was jealous of those people who can gather in over a hundred guests for such an event, but my family was not large, either. But I was pleased, if not thrilled.

The day grew near. I checked the forecast repeatedly. More so as the day grew nearer still. Twice a day or so. Rain was in the forecast. Of course there was. But there was a hint of hope. The day before was to be clear and sunny, hot. The day after was as beautiful. The rain might pass us by, I thought. The forecast will improve as we drew closer. It did not.

“Maybe you can move the event,” people told me. But one or two of the people who I really wanted to be there could not make it the next weekend. Moving it further conflicted with even more people’s schedule. It was summer, after all; people had plans; people had holidays; people were travelling.
The day arrived, and it did indeed rain. Buckets fell. Cats and dogs. A river of overflow raced down my street.

Should I cancel? Would anyone come? I considered renaming the event DAVID’S HURRICANE BARBEQUE BASH. “Oh well,” I thought, “rushing out into the biblical deluge to get what I discovered I was missing.

People did come. Most came. And some brought gifts, even though I’d specifically requested that no one do so. “It’s not my birthday,” I told them. I’d even said so on the Event page.
I cooked the burgers and sausages and dogs in the rain.
Once that was done, I settled in to not be the host. Make your own drinks, I thought. Entertain yourselves. I wanted to be a guest at my own party.
If you were there, thank you. You helped make my day.
If you were not, not to worry. Bev’s 50th BIRTHDAY BARBEQUE/HURRICANE PARTY was much the same the next summer.

Some further good came from it. I rekindled my friendship with Henri and Sylvie for a time. They invited us to their anniversary party a few months later. And then they invited us to join them on a Mediterranean cruise a few months after. Ports of Call: Venice, Mykonos, Athens, Istanbul, Nice (Capri and Sorrento), Rome (Orvieto for us), Florence and Pisa, and Barcelona. It was fun, but we weren’t attached to Henri and Sylvie throughout the cruise; we were used to going it alone while on vacation, me even more so than Bev. They may have expected us to be by their side throughout, but that didn’t happen; but, at least it always gave us something to talk about during dinner.

A return to Killarny Lodge followed the next year. I brought Bev to New Orleans and New York the next (a return for me, new ground for Bev, but I wanted her to experience what she’d missed in 2010), where on our first day in New York, the couple eating supper next to us at the Italian Restaurant next door offered us free tickets to the smash hit Bandstand. New Orleans brought the same excursions, but better music on Frenchman’s Street and Beignets here and there and Hurricanes at Pat O’Brian’s, while New York brought jazz at Dizzy’s Club Cocoa-Cola and at Smalls and Mezzrow’s. Central Park and Broadway and Little Italy.

Life’s been good. Life’s been a struggle. Life’s been an adventure. Life has been as life has been.

A long time ago, shortly after we’d moved away from Cochrane, but back when we were still returning for weekends at the cottage, returning for holidays and carnivals, Keith and I were playing on 16^th Avenue. It was a slow day. A weekend. Cold. Winter. Mostly bathed in sun. Clouds flowed past as we stormed the snowbank seawall of Omaha beach, or some such, hockey sticks cut to our height serving as rifles. We stormed that beachhead again and again, pretending to almost scale its height before the imaginary enemy took careful aim and shot us, killing us in turn. We posed melodramatically, our arms splayed out, and collapsed, rolling back down what seemed a precipice at the time but must have only been a few short feet, coming to rest at its foot, looking up at the sky until we rose to storm the hill again, to the same result. After unnumbered repetitions, we lay flat out on the street, looking up at the sky and the clouds. Dead. Quiet. Awestruck with imaginings. Imagining what we saw in their shapes, pointing them out after a time and finding what the other saw there, declaring, “Yeah, I see it,” once we did. Frogs and chickens and ships and horses. There was giggling. There was laughter. There were comfortable silences.

For all that imagining, for all those flights of fancy, we, neither of us, had any clue what was to come. Or what might become of us. We were just children, after all, just starting out, an eternity before us.
It has been a symphony of happenstance, of cause and effect, and despite the stumbles and setbacks, despite the pitfalls, it has been an adventure. It has been a truly awe-inspiring and epic discovery of what it means to be me.