Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
If you were born on the 11th of September, you can make a wish and blow out the candles, but that silly old song will never sound the same.
Dec 21, 2001 | This year for my birthday I got a terrorist attack. I was hoping for an Adirondack chair. In late September it warms up out at San Francisco's Ocean Beach, and I was planning to spend long, drowsy afternoons sitting in my new chair out on the back deck reading the New York Times Magazine.
Since the attacks, that chair in which I was going to read has become the chair from which I will perhaps watch the end of the world unfold in the eastern sky. As novelist Robert Stone said in a recent interview, "History has come for us, it's here; what we feared is beginning to happen to us."
And I still haven't had a decent birthday party.
I was planning to take most of the day off on Sept. 11, as is local custom on my birthday, but an editor at work called early that morning and said, "Wake up, birthday boy, turn on the television." So like everybody else I turned on the television and participated in that big national stretching of the conceivable.
It took such stretching that, perhaps like you, I'm still a little sore from it.
My wife baked me a birthday cake late on the night of Sept. 11, but being in the news business I had to work that day and many days after that, and never really got to enjoy the cake. And then by the time events at the World Trade Center had slowed down a little, we'd forgotten about my birthday and were trying to figure out who was sending the anthrax.
And then the troops went into Afghanistan.
And then that plane crashed in Queens.
And to top it off, since my birthday, people have been saying things that I translate in my head as "Since Cary Tennis' birthday, I've been having sudden fits of crying in elevators"; "Since Cary Tennis' birthday, I just don't want to go outside"; "Since Cary Tennis' birthday, I don't trust anyone."
Consumer confidence is down, too. It's been a hell of a year.
---------------------
When I was young, for my birthday I would sometimes get green plastic soldiers. To a little boy craving power in a frightening world (this was in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis), a gift of toy soldiers is a gift of command; to receive such a gift on one's birthday is significant beyond what grown-ups might assume. And my birthday was mine; though it was recognized widely by family and friends as a time to celebrate, there was never any question about who was at the center of the celebration. That's what I liked about my birthday: It was all about me.
Next year, Sept. 11 will be about everything but me. While I'm trying to celebrate my birthday, the newspapers and television will be filled with dark soliloquies straining for eloquence and patriotic images that border on kitsch. Flaming buildings will fall endlessly into a sea of dust and fleeing faces. And there I'll be, making a wish, blowing out candles.
-----------------------
In addition to army men, I sometimes received building blocks for my birthday. With blocks you could build a tower. With little howitzers you could protect the tower. With kneeling riflemen you could repel invaders. With a wall you could surround the tower. But with a plane pinched between thumb and finger, the neighbor boy could fly right over the walls, evade the howitzers and crash the tower of blocks to the floor.
And then, because you were children, you could laugh and start over, building the tower, surrounding the tower, waiting for the neighbor boy to knock it down again. You could talk about how many people would have been killed, whether the pilot ejected safely, whether the Incredible Hulk would have been crushed (he wouldn't), whether Spiderman could have survived (he would have slung some web to the next building and swung to safety) and whether a lone rifleman perched in a window could have blown up the approaching plane and sent it crashing down (we always wondered about that, and never had it settled).
As adults, we also like to sit around and speculate after the disaster: What if the pilots had been armed? What if all passengers were restrained in their seats for the duration of the flight? But we don't get to pick up the blocks and rebuild the tower. Unlike that green summer of rehearsals for life that is childhood, adulthood is a long series of tough seminars in the unundoable character of action. You learn how cruelly constrained are your actual choices, how locked into cause and effect is each college, each job, each city, each lover. You let go of the fantasy about becoming a circus acrobat. You give up the dream of the Princeton professorship and the brilliant girlfriend who invents a formula to make you invisible, suede elbow patches and all. There go all the birthday games with the toy soldiers.
Get Salon in your mailbox!