74th Birthday Tale

My first real memories, or at least the ones that play in my mind like video and not just as individual snapshots, are from the day my family moved to a two bedroom brick box, on a gravel street with ditches on both sides, like a country lane. Summer 1954, 1052 West Ash Street, Columbia, Missouri. Kenny, a rotten little red-haired neighbor boy grabbed my hand as I stepped out of the station wagon and into our new, blank, treeless yard. “C’mon, babe, let’s go to the show!” he yelled. I was terrified.

Old dirt roads and even Indian trails must yet be pressed underneath gravel and blacktop surfaces, as must a little, quaking, colt-legged girl still be somewhere underneath the skin of the seventy-four-year-old woman I become today. The past doesn’t go “past”, but slowly melts into the present. Every day the jolly, plump World—imagine it wearing a chef’s hat—spoons buttery blobs of Time into the batter of Eternity, stirring and stirring. Every day, less and less of the lumpy, melting past is recognizable to those who lived it.

Feeling old, feeling the humiliation of my dissolving memory, I consider dressing up in my long white nightgown and padding silently around the house, practicing at being a ghost. Instead, I step outside and watch the four-and-a-half-billion-year-old, tiny, new moon swimming in the remains of sunset. Clabbered, still-pink clouds hang down like my mother’s fat arms. I love this illusory, dissolving and reforming world so much that I will go inside now, and in its honor and in my own, eat cake.