An October Birthday
Atop a special hill many, many years ago when I was nine or so, I sat cross legged among the graceful pines of the lost homeland, dressed in new clothes my mom had bought the day before, along with a wrapped gift. The gift on my lap, I gazed onto the windows and yard of a marble house downhill - a cool breeze sweeping the pines, sunset yellow and orange reflecting off its windows with silhouettes and murmurs traffic chasing each other. I had just left the house and the birthday party inside it and walked up the hill to sit among the pines. The birthday party was for a nine years old girl who lived with her family in our neighborhood, but on the other, gentler side. I knew the girl but not that well. We may have spoken once or twice before, but it was all from a distance, and always interrupted by everything and everyone else. Our moms, I suspect knew each other well. The fathers were off in the gulf, working.
Me and the other boys in our part of the neighborhood often talked about her. I remember her being stunningly beautiful, graceful, to us nine or ten years old boys. The older boys in the neighborhood invented myths surrounding her and her family's wealth. Brazil and Canada are two destinations still resonate in my head. Since she did not go to our school, these myths were the unchallenged currency in our part of the neighborhood. She went to the other school, you see, on the gentler side of town, where the teachers, pupils, even the janitors, spoke only "ingleezy", one of the boys always was keen to remind us. I mostly listened and nodded when one of them would invent his own, personal story about her, with her, about the two of them. I kept my own stories to myself. On few occasions I would glance her from our building, crossing the wide street with her mom, to our side, to my world. I would keep staring until they both are lost in the crowd beneath our window, and I in my day dreams. For few passing moments, for real or invented images that I still recall to this day.
I had arrived at her house dressed in my new clothes, a gift in hand and a wide smile. I do not remember being nervous or even restless, just anxious may be, with hope and anticipation. I rang the big green metal door, her mom opened the door revealing a well lit hallway and a large dining room in the background with dark, oversized furniture, along with a colorfully decorated table in the middle with gifts on it and balloons and kids in bright looking new clothes all around it. The mom pointed me to the big room and dashed off. For whatever reason, I expected her to open the door. She did not. I expected her to be in the middle of that big room, she was not. I toured the house, gift in hand and a frozen smile looking for her. She was no where to be found. Suddenly, I hear a familiar laugh coming from outside the house. I rushed to the "baranda" and looked over the yard, and there she was. Surrounded by no less than a dozen boys and girls, in loud but cheerful voices and chaotic gestures. I began to open my mouth, to raise my arm, to alert her to my presence, up here, on the "baranda". I did not though. I must have felt it was futile, or too late. I looked at the wrapped gift and headed to the table to put it there, next to the other gifts. I did not. I headed to the front door instead, down the wide stone stairs and around the house, then up the hill to the pines.
I sat cross legged between the pines gazing down at the house. I could feel the commotion downhill, coming from the house, but could not see or hear any one, not her. I found a twig I used to a dig a small hole that I was able to bury the unopened gift in. I gathered few brisk pine needles to cover the dirt with. I got up, moved down the hill in the other direction of the house and headed home. I do not recall my mom or any one else asking about the birthday party, the unopened gift, her, then or since. Thirty years later on a visit to give a talk to the local university, I went back to the pines and the hill. I could spot the big house (among many new ones) but not the exact spot where the unopened gift was buried. I gather someone else had found it, and had given it (back) to her, eventually. Or not.
I do not know how to under-analyze or over-analyze this October birthday story of mine which, I suspect, every boy at one point or another in his life collected a similar one, every October. Time again, and again.
I see the passage of time not as an arrow but as a series of footprints, in the sand. Fleeting, disconnected events in an otherwise placid, infinite extant of Octobers. Few are mine to claim.
With those few, I am destined to have a cyclic, ritual dance with two profound sets of footprints in my little corner of this lonely extant. Every October. They come to be in October by chance. They come to be my destiny may be by chance, may be not, I will never know. My dance, however, is not. It is my choice, my whisper, my ritual.
The dance of those singular footprints, becomes "the arrow", tracing back and forth to where it was, where it could have been. Where it started and where it ended. Where it was born and where it was buried.
I fear that I lose a little every October. I forget a step here, or a whisper there, every October. One tear less every October.
How many Octobers are there? Eight or nine? Thirty or forty five? Countless few? How many are truly mine?
Every October, there is a birthday or two. One (was) mine.
