Happy birthday, Billy. Remember when you were so broken up about turning ten? How terrified you were. Certain that, from then on, you’d be forced to wander through sorrow wearing nothing but sneakers, bleeding nothing but blood.
Today you turn seventy-nine.
Billy, if you were my good friend, and I so wish that you were, I would throw you a party. I’d make you a cake with seventy-nine blazing candles. I would set the small bonfire in front of you, then I, and everyone you cared about, would sing for he’s a jolly good fellow. And we’d all mean it.
At the end of the night, everyone would leave, but you would stay to help do the dishes because that’s the kind of friend you are. I would wash and you would dry, and I’d ask you if it was really so bad, turning ten.
And you’d say, yes, it was more horrible and delightful than I could have ever imagined.
And you would ask me what I remember about turning ten and I would tell you that, for me, what hurt most about the whole affair was knowing I was another year removed from seven.
When I was seven, my mother drove a gold Saturn SL2. It reeked of cigarettes, the backseat was marred by melted Silly Putty, the A.C. didn’t work, the glove box didn’t shut and was gagged with cassettes — Buddy Holly, Don McLean, The Vinyl Cafe. And it had windows you had to crank open by hand.
My dad’s car had electric windows. And it was green, not gold. And the air conditioning worked. And it didn’t smell like cigarettes because my dad didn’t smoke. He did when I was younger—two, and three, and four—but by the time I was seven he didn’t anymore.
I remember being seven and sitting alone in my mother’s smoke-soaked car in a Price Chopper parking lot. She had gone to return the shopping cart to its corral and would return with one shiny quarter—mine to keep. She must have run into someone she knew on her way across the lot because the clock above the cassette player kept on changing and there was still no sign of her or my quarter. I needed that quarter. I’d be smart with that quarter. No gum balls for me. I was gonna go to college on that quarter.
I could have gotten out of the car and looked around for her, to make sure my money was good and safe but I was so comfortable. Sitting alone in that warm car, running my hand over that soft, dusty upholstery, being seven. It was nice.
She came back eventually, and I got my quarter (it didn’t take me to college, I spent it on a palmful of stale Skittles a week later), and we left the parking lot. We went home and I turned eight and then nine and then ten. When I was seven, I was sitting in my mom’s Saturn in a Price Chopper parking lot. By the time I was ten, I wasn’t anymore.
The year I turned ten, Saturn sales plummeted. By the time I was eleven, the brand was discontinued and all Saturn dealerships shut down completely. And somewhere along the line that Price Chopper became a Giant Tiger.
In turning two, you said goodbye to the perfect simplicity of being one. In turning five, you surrendered your wizard cap. In turning ten, you admitted defeat. By turning ten, you opened the door to fear and hate and hurt. Enough to make you want to quit. To bow out of turning eleven all together.
But you wouldn’t dare. If you didn’t turn eleven, you never would have made it to thirty-six, and you never would have had any work published at all. You never would have been able to take off Emily Dickinson’s clothes, or have the best cigarette, or taste the hot and sour soup at that one Chinese restuarant, or look back on turning ten with such care and compassion.
Really, the problem isn’t in turning ten, it’s just the turning in general. The change that you can’t stop. Walking out of every birthday with nothing but good wishes, knowing that every year of your life will be catastrophically worse and profoundly better than the last. Somehow simultaneously. And all you can do, year after year, is hope that you’ll make it to the next round in one piece. Or battered and bruised but in good company at least. Surrounded by a few smiling faces who will raise their glasses and say here’s to seventy-nine stunning and ravaging years. And many, many more.
For your consideration, a few passionate reviews of the Stafford Square Price Chopper that one could also submit as a review of childhood without much editing at all:
