Mom’s Birthday
It was my mom’s birthday several days ago. The day crept up on me, and even though I was semi-consciously monitoring its arrival, somehow The Day had arrived without my having made any type of preparations for it at all. Except, sort of. Preparations to make preparations, but only half-formed ones, like somehow, at some critical juncture, my brain would go into overdrive, an atypical ‘birthday planning’ state, in which it can only operate for small amounts of time, but enough time to undertake my task.
I drove to a big grocery store nearby, a huge place, with a walk-in beer cooler, a room devoted to wine and cheese, and a mezzanine level, in which an overpriced cooking school is located, where predominantly recently married couples (it seems, though of course some long-married couples go too, their distant interaction with the younger couples suggesting an unspoken inevitability that these classes will, not all that far off in the future, serve as the glue that sticks it all together) learn new recipes and techniques which require many styles of beer, and they love it, getting buzzed and sentimental. I’ve sometimes gone to the store for the express purpose of watching the cooking school participants through the frosted, calligraphy stenciled glass, under the guise of reading a book or acting as if I’m waiting for my own partner or participant to arrive.
But the grocery store also houses a large greeting card section, which contains too many cards, some of which seem almost too clever or too complicated to buy. I don’t want a card that has multiple, smaller cards encased within it, cards that pop out and play music to the person who’s opened it. I just want a traditional card, a rectangular, completely standard thing with a front, inside, and back. No “It’s a Wonderful World,” just a card that isn’t designed to be an intuited puzzle, which contains humor of the type you’d laugh off while having brunch with extended family, your local-yet-estranged first cousin inundating you with his favorite FunnyPix of the month, the funniest of them, to him, producing a markedly increased throbbing of his already pronounced jugular vein, a bizarrely bright red coloration settling on the very tip of his squashed nose, like a compromised cherry you’d like to flick off and splatter on the opposite wall.
On this occasion — and now, it seems, on so many others — I felt nothing about the impending birthday, was a mostly thoughtless and unfeeling vessel, although one which possessed a mechanism that allowed propriety to remain more or less unblemished.
So I made a move to where the Blank Card section was. Thumbing through a nearby area of cards was an obese, middle-aged man, red-cheeked and postured strangely, as if he’d soon begin bowing apologetically. The way he’d been standing was just how his body had naturally and involuntarily positioned itself, I later learned.
The thought that his physical presence might soon enter into my periphery took hold in my head, and then that very thing happened: he took a dumb step toward me, no-necked and grinning, gesticulating and saying, “What ‘bout a card that say you’re a bitch but I still lu’ ya?”
He was sad. A distressing sight launching depressing words right at me, and I was so close to him. They all landed on me. I felt the full brunt of whatever it was he was communicating, though probably not so similar to the feelings that had inspired him to say it, I feel.
It was sad. But after choosing my blank card, on which I’d inevitably write the same, unvarying greeting, the sentiment unchanged and one which I write on all cards, one birthday and holiday after another, I walked away smiling, though in a withdrawn way, thinking it’d be best I went undetected.
I walked away, blank card in hand, my greeting card aisle friend’s statement making me reconsider my, or what had been, cold and logical greeting card purchasing approach. But while distancing myself from him, both physically and temporally, it struck me that the card shopping process isn’t, or maybe doesn’t have to be, one which is simply fulfilled, checked off from a list, and rarely considered, until the occasion necessitating a purchase suddenly presents itself at the organizational doorstep of your somewhat troubled/compromised/flooded executive functioning. When it’s on top of you, it’s all but impossible to hold the intended recipient in your mind as a unique and highly individualized being: there’s a good chance that whatever your choice is will be characterized by an absence of inconsideration — the card’s recipient being completely unable to accuse the giver of thoughtlessness or hurriedness and unplannedness while making their selection.
After leaving the store, I thought about how I might like to write about my perception of this experience, while sitting in the car, regularly running hands along legs and the opposite arm, the worry that a written retelling of this event would somehow inevitably render it all unintelligible, or purposefully overcomplicated, when really, I feel that its written form pretty genuinely encapsulates my true feelings toward it.
The temptation to search for ‘standard greeting card messages for mom’ presented itself to me, after arriving home, with not much time to go before the gift giving ceremony was to begin. But I didn’t do that. I painfully tried to divine something real, coming solely from my own mind, without an iota of outside influence, in my own condensed and vaguely perfectionist scrawl. And though nothing clever enough or loving enough was written, as was my critical self’s involuntary interpretation, my mom was happy. She doesn’t know about any of this, and probably never will. She buys all her greeting cards from the dollar store, along with creamy peppermints and flimsy razor blades. Maybe I’ve made and am making far too big a deal out of all of this. Maybe she does all of this stuff, too, goes through this whole pathetically circuitous internal monologue. I expect to get a card from her within the next few months.
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