Ghosts of Birthdays Past

My birthday is around the corner. For quite some time now, I have not had much interest in celebrating my birthday, I just don’t think that it is that important. Still with 56 of them behind me, they have supplied me with many smiles and special moments to remember.

Actually the first birthday memory I have is one that involved a friend’s birthday when I was just a little guy. It was one of those birthdays where mom would take me to K-mart or Eckards to pick out a toy as a gift for the party. I think I always wanted the gifts Mom got for my friends. This particular time I remember sitting in the front seat as Mom drove me in our station wagon to John Wilson’s birthday party. I was crying because she said I had to give the wrapped gift in my lap to John, that it was not for me. I don’t know why that memory or part of a memory is so vivid, but it is. Maybe I grew to be ashamed of my selfishness, maybe deep down I think all gifts should be mine, or maybe it is just one of those memories that you hold onto for no particular reason like the fact that Yule Gibbons (that once famous eater of pine trees) was the spokes person for Grape Nuts.

As for my birthdays, here are the top three in no particular order. They all concern adult Teever, and they all have their place in my heart for a reason.

The first one that comes to mind was when I was at Clemson. I did not have too many friends on campus. From the beginning, I fell in with a local group of runners. Great guys that I will never forget. Together we formed the Outta Control Track Club (OCTC) and to me our adventures will always be legendary. Anyway, I don’t remember which birthday it was – likely my 20th. I invited several of these friends to dinner down the road at the Swamp Guinea Restaurant in Hartwell, Georgia. I did not tell any of them it was my birthday. I just wanted to spend some of that birthday in the company of my friends and surprise them by paying for the dinner (my way of giving thanks for another year and the blessings it had brought). As it turned out, my friends knew it was my birthday and they surprised me. They surprised me with gifts and paying for my dinner – fried catfish and fries served family style. We all loved the Swamp Guinea. That fish camp is still there and is worth the price of admission, especially if you are short on making your grease quota – no kale allowed.

The second birthday in my top 3 would be my 30th birthday. At the beginning of 1992 was when I met Jean-Marie and began dating, followed by the dive off a steep cliff into love. That summer Jean-Marie said she wanted to throw my 30th birthday party for me. We had it in the back yard of her house. I vividly recall being surrounded by friends in the glow if the little white lights in the apple tree. It was very special to me that Jean-Marie would have that party, invite all my friends for a warm summer night of food, drink, and laughter. Few days have made me feel more special (with the obvious exception of our wedding day).

Finally, there was a particular birthday when I came home to celebrate with mom and to see my father who by that time was in a full time Alzheimer’s care unit. It must have been a birthday in my forties although I don’t recall which one. Jean-Marie was with me and we were staying with mom. It was a nice little party as some of my siblings were able to make it. Living out in Colorado the sightings of my South Carolina bound siblings is far too sparse. I know my little sister Ginny was there with her family at mom’s for cake (they only lived a mile away). I don’t know what if any gifts I got, but I won’t forget the cake. After I blew out the candles the cake disappeared back into the kitchen along with Jean-Marie, Mom, Ginny, and Ginny’s eldest Cameron. My niece Cameron’s birthday is just a week after mine, not that it bears any on this story but as long as I am allowed to babble – I’m going to take full advantage of it. In my family, the tradition is that the first slice of birthday cake goes to the birthday celebrant. This is critical. Because we didn’t cut the cake into wedges. The cake is first cut vertically through the middle. Then pieces are sliced perpendicular to that cut. You may ask why that should make any difference. Well it does, it makes a big difference. The first piece (and only 3 others in the cake) will have one full side covered with icing and not just two of the edges. In my family, that slice is the most coveted. So out of the kitchen comes little Cameron with my piece of cake and I can’t wait. She stopped just outside the kitchen and smiled holding the plate out in my direction. “Uncle Teever, Annie (her grandmother/my mom) told me to give this piece to you. Can I have it? I already licked it?” It is hard to stop smiling when I think of that – and yes I gave her the first piece.

Reflecting Pools

I have never liked my birthday. Not for fear of getting older, or leaving things to the past as the always unknown future beckoned. I think it was the attention, I don’t like the attention. I have always enjoyed celebrating those around me much more than celebrating myself. Also, there is the fact that I am an observer and it doesn’t feel right to be observed. Still there is no feeling on earth so good as knowing my life is populated by so many intelligent, loving, and fun friends and family.

The blink of an eye that has been the last 55 years has come at a price. I am missing so much of my childhood. The tide of time that flows behind starts out a full river from today, but when it hits my first 15 years it has shallowed and is broken by water rounded stones and sandbars. My early years exist as little more than countless unconnected tidal pools. Still, the reflections found in these pools do provide insight into who I am, how I came to be.

For the past 32 years I have worked in the rail industry as consultant and researcher. A result more of lucky happenstance than choosing. But I have a certain love of trains in my earliest days. I have pictures of me playing with toy train sets, there is a film that has me whirling some coupled rail cars above my head when I was just a toddler. There was a story my father told me over and over of me mimicking his hand gestures and sound effects when showing how a grade crossing worked when I was just in a high chair. And then finally, memories I will always cherish are those of going to the train station to pick up my grandmother when she would visit for holidays in the 60’s. What I do remember most about that is looking down the track and seeing the parallel rails merge in the far distance and thinking that is where Connecticut must be.

There are images in my mind of sneaking into my parent’s bedroom when they were not around. I would look around and sometimes snoop in Daddy’s things. Mainly I went in there for the security it provided to me. Being among Mom’s and Dad’s possession, the bed they slept in, the toiletries they groomed with brought me to the bedrock that was their love and support. It made me feel safe. Such memories often have bitter sweet ties, because it also brings back the time we small children were gathered about our parents in the living room as they told us that they were separating, and even though they got back together, their bedroom, my bedrock never felt quite as concrete.

I remember the birthdays of others when I was growing up. As a small person once, Mom was taking me to John Wilson’s birthday party. We had gone to Eckerds Drugs and picked out what I thought was a neat toy for John and wrapped it up. On the way to the party I cried because I couldn’t keep the toy and had to give it away to my friend. There was a birthday of my best friend Ben Lovejoy one year where in tribute to our favorite SNL skit, I made for him a model of George and Yortek’s (two very wild and crazy guys) industrial vacuum cleaner, and gave him a Hulk-head bank with a mock check for one million dollars to put in it. When I told my father about these gifts, he was genuinely shocked and told me that even written on scrap paper the check I had drawn was legal tender. I never worried, Ben knows I am good for it.

There are a million more fragments that have formed me. Recollections of sailing, vacationing at Calloway Gardens, playing baseball and football with the Griffiths next store, visiting grandparents and cousins in Atlanta, seeing ball games, stealing through the woods and swamp that were so close to our home, the vine kingdom, running through culverts, laughing, running with packs of friends on the warm, humid nights in South Carolina. There were the fears that helped mold me like my early (and not completely resolved) fear of heights, frightened of being sent to Vietnam because my draft lottery number was 5 (even though I was only 7), fear of the police looking for me after some insensitive adult yelled at me and threatened me because I was putting dirt clods on the road and watching cars run over them. My life to me is an impossibly complicated puzzle of countless pieces, that have assembled into a life I am blessed by and could never have imagined. In observing others, I guess I hope to make sense of the observations I see in me. Then again, miraculous outcomes are made to be accepted and not explained.

Take Me to the River

Life is a river that you are baptized in, anointed in its holy waters from the cradle to the grave. It teaches you first to learn, and then to teach before you simply melt away and become part of its flow, part of its fertile silt. It is a lonely river if you never have any one to pass your knowledge of shoals, rapids, falls, calms, pools, and life on to. With each step into it, with each inch towards its relentlessly speeding current, you find out more about yourself and the river, even if that next step is on your tip toes. When you are younger, time moves slowly because you are at the rivers edge, as you get older it moves more quickly because you are further out into its currents. At fifty, I can still see the shore but I can also feel the rivers strong pull as I round this bend and look towards the next.

At birth, I was dipped in playfully at the bank by my parents, as I grew older they held my hand as I tottered into water muddied by my awkward foot falls to investigate eddies, and pools with crayfish in them. They watched as I took my first solo steps and wound up plopping down butt first in the water, sometimes crying sometimes laughing. These were my early years, where my parents were with, by me, looking over me, allowing me to drink at the rivers edge, but were careful not to let me slip in, not to let time run away with me too quickly.

Growing older, I waded further into the river but always with my parents’ knowledge of where I was going, where I would be. The river flowed a little faster for me, the pull of it a little stronger. I saw fish swimming about my feet in the shallows. I felt invincible as I flew over the sun splashed water on a rope swing, laughing and howling with friends, both scared and exhilarated. Life passed about, or we passed through it, sometimes it is impossible to tell. In the hubris of my youth, I believed the river was my own and that I would know it from headwaters to sea.

Knowledge of mind grew, comfort with body gained, insecurities of whom I was and what I would do with my life churned and swirled not unlike the river itself. The river had broadened and its current strengthened. I went off to college, feeling only a tenuous life line to home as I waded out further still with toes blindly groping for safe foot falls. I made friends, I established identity, the river for the moment did not seem so frightening, and my life line slowly rotted in the stream as all such lines must.

The river took me from my home, and gave me to the mountains and to the west. My parents and family were still strong within me, but I was chest deep and heading for rapids, my life was my own and I had to learn to swim or sink on my own. As my first brief marriage tumbled through white water and rocks ending in divorce, my hand grasped reflexively for my mommy’s and daddy’s grip at he waters edge. They were there in spirit and gave me all the love and encouragement I could want, but ultimately I had to keep myself afloat.

The rapids changed into a long meandering stretch where I could rest myself, cool in the waters, and bask in the sun. Far from family, bounded by far reaching prairie to the east and ragged mountains to the west, I was the better off for what I had been through, I found more of myself. I found likes and dislikes; I found life in friends, and life in people I could help (which in turn helped me).

The river only began to speed again when I met Jean-Marie, and her three incredible children. No longer was I alone in the river, Jean-Marie floated beside me. We watched over the children as they took their own tentative steps from the banks, their own daring dives from tire swings. The river seemed easier to manage with love and companionship, held less fear of self when there are children to watch over and guide on their own river’s journey.

It has not been a lazy river since then, friends and family have passed, children have gone through rough patches, the marriage itself has gone through rapids, but with each other to cling to there was less of a chance of drowning and with each mishap and heartache and insult to our lives, having each other has kept us from sinking. I don’t mean to say that there were no slow spots, because there have been many, there will be many more. I will enjoy the ease of floating down them, hugging my wife to me as we smile and laugh.

When I look to the bank now, I see our children wading into the deeper faster water, I see our grandchildren look for fish and play on the tire swing. I am both joyous and afraid. I know some of what the river can do, some of what it can bring. I cannot change its course, I can only go with it and watch out for the one’s I love as best I can ultimately knowing how they handle the rapids and the white water is up to them.

Turning fifty has not been the plunge over the falls that some have warned me of, but it is humbling to go back and look at the winding river, to see its length and breadth and know that I am only looking at a tiny part of a bigger picture, a world river, a flow of time and souls that began longer ago than my memory can process, and will not reach its end at the sea until a time my imagination cannot conceive of.