"I'm feelin' thankful
for the small things today
I'm feelin' thankful
for the small things today
Happy, happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
and to you..."
"Happy Birthday To Me", Cracker
Me and Lauren always had a thing for carrot cake.
It started all the way back at the beginning, back in April of 1993.
We'd said goodbye to each other that previous December, knowing we wanted to give new-found feelings a chance to bloom, and not knowing how those feelings would stand the strain of living an ocean apart from each other.
She came over to see me that April. Within a couple of days, we admitted that we felt like we knew. Knew that we'd wind up together.
She arrived on Wednesday, April 14th. I met her at JFK and we took a train back upstate.
On that Saturday, my mom held a fiftieth birthday party for my dad. She invited me and Lauren. My sisters and my brother would be there, as well as my dad's best friend and his wife and a couple of other people. Lauren felt nervous about meeting them all at once, but we still wanted to go.
That afternoon, after waking up to find ourselves, in the words of a character from a novel I've just finished, "shipwrecked on the sheets", I threw on some sweatpants, donned my faded Yankees cap, and staggered out in the bright spring sunshine, barely able to stay on my feet.
I walked over to the bakery down the street. Carosello's. We both had serious cravings for massive doses of sugar. I stood at the counter and looked at the goodies laid out in their cases: donuts, cakes, pies, eclairs, cannoli. I spied some slices of carrot cake and made up my mind: we needed carrot cake. I ordered four slices of it, had the slices put into a cardboard box, paid, and then I stumbled back out in to the street and back over to my apartment.
We ate the cake in my bed. A man could spend a lot of money and travel many miles chasing down some golden perfect vision of the glory of living and still find himself far short of the simple laughing joy we got from eating that carrot cake in that bed, the frosting sticking to our mouths and crumbs from the cake bouncing off the bedspread down onto the wood floor.
One of my sisters came and got us and brought us up to my father's birthday party. I had to sit in the back seat so I could sit next to Lauren; after so many months apart I couldn't even stand to sit up front with her all the way in the back.
Me and my sister warned her about my dad on the way up: he won't say two words all night, and of those two words, neither will be directed toward you, but don't worry, we said, it's nothing personal.
We got to my parents' house and sat on the couch. Lauren wore a pair of black pants and a white knit sweater. I put my arm around her shoulder and felt sweat on her neck. I looked at her and asked if she felt alright.
I'm a bit nervous, she said.
My dad, true to form, made me and my sister look like liars by talking nonstop. About twenty of us sat around the dining room table, eating chicken parm and homemade spaghetti while he regaled us with tale after tale from his youth.
As we drove back to my place she said, I thought you said your dad never talked.
He usually doesn't, I said. I don't know what got into him tonight.
&&&&
I turned forty two years old on Thursday. I did not observe the occasion. I got a few quiet birthday wishes from family and friends; my mother said she knew I wanted to pretend that the day wasn't happening but seeing as how she had given birth to me, she felt entitled to at least say happy birthday.
But we had no cake, no presents, no singing, and no joy, for we had no Lauren. My first birthday without her, the first since I lost her last November.
It was every bit as lonely and as miserable as I'd expected.
&&&&
Last year I spent my forty first birthday in a hospital. Lauren had gone home to England to spend some time with her mother. Her mom "celebrated" her birthday last year, last June 1st, by having the second of her two cancer surgeries. Lauren had missed the first surgery, because we'd had so little notice of it, but when we got the date for the second operation, a month ahead of time, I insisted she go see her mother.
Lauren went reluctantly; we have three children, one of whom, at just ten months old, still breast-fed and another who, at two and a half, was going through a stage of extreme mommy preference. Go, I said. What's the worst that can happen? I'll manage.
A couple of days after Lauren left, our daughter came down with a vicious stomach bug, and as it turned out she needed some time in the hospital, getting intravenous fluids to stave off dehydration. So I spent my birthday in the hospital with my sick daughter, with my wife thousands of miles away.
I couldn't complain, of course, not after the birthday weekend I'd had the year before, when I turned forty. We turned that Memorial Day weekend into a four-day bacchanal; we went away for a couple of days, went out for meals, and topped it off with a party at our house on the Monday, the actual day of my birthday.
While sitting with my daughter in the hospital on my birthday last year I reflected back on that weekend and laughed and thought, well, that weekend was just too good, I guess I had to pay for it the next year.
I spoke with Lauren on the phone that night, and she felt bad about not being there, but I did my best to reassure her, that I could manage and that our daughter would be fine.
As we hung up the phone that night she sighed and said, don't worry, dear, I'll make it up to you next year, we'll have another big birthday for you next year.
Neither of us ever would have dreamed that it would be the last birthday we'd have together.
On her birthday this year, in January, I found myself driving down to JFK to board a plane that would take me to her homeland, for a memorial service in her honor; on my birthday this year, on Thursday, I found myself a different sort of shipwrecked on the sheets, crying myself to sleep.
&&&&
I had a bunch of errands to run on Saturday, so I loaded our three children into the van and headed out into the world. At one point we approached a bakery, the Bella Napoli bakery, a place me and my oldest used to frequent on other, different Saturdays, back when we lived in a world that seemed so happy then but seems so foreign now.
Dad, let's stop and get donuts, c'mon.
Evie, now three and a half, lit up at the mention of "the d-word" and she shouted encouragement from her car seat. Even Riley, at just twenty one months, already knows the wonders of donuts, and he chimed in, as well: donduts, donduts daddy, donduts.
I pulled into the parking lot and got them all out. Looked around at all the goodies on display. Same deal as that day in Carosello's all those years ago: donuts, cakes, pies, eclairs, cannoli. I ordered some donuts for the kids, three glazed and three jelly.
I spotted a carrot cake. I ordered that, too.
The kids sat in their seats and ate their donuts as we drove home. The kids, our kids. We got home and I put the carrot cake in the fridge and we went about our family's business the rest of the day, and we did the same today. They ate and played and slept and I ate and made beds and did dishes and laundry and cleaned. We talked. Laughed when we could.
We entered that bakery thirty six hours ago, came home an hour after that.
And that damn carrot cake still sits in our fridge, with the string around the outside of the box.
I just can't seem to bring myself to cut that string and open that box and cut myself a piece of that cake.
Perhaps tomorrow.