Ed. note: Watching Rob Shore's And Many More earlier this week reminded me of my all-time favorite literary passage about a birthday party, from E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair (Random House, 1985):
At that moment the doorbell rang, and in anticipation of my
first guest I wriggled out of my mother’s arms, slid my arched spine over her
knees, and landed on the floor under the table, and crouched there. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” my
mother asked. But I had no intention of
doing that; I only wanted to hide.
The day
was momentous, but parties were mixed blessings. You got presents, all right—pick-up sticks,
or crayons, or flat boxes of modeling clay in many colored strips—but they were
the lesser presents of party admissions.
And we all had to sit at the table with ridiculous pointed paper hats,
and paper plates and noisemakers and popping balloons and pretend to a joyful
delirium. In fact, a birthday party was
a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing
Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics
of the event, the way each child was dressed for it and so on; and who set us upon one another in
games of the most acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or
punched each other to inflict pain.
And it
was all done up in the impermanent materials of crepe paper, thin rubber and
tin, everything painted in the gaudy colors of lies.
And the
climax of the chaos, blowing out the candles on the cake, presented likely
possibility of public failure and a loss of luck in the event the thing was not
done well. In fact, I had a secret dread
of not being able to blow out the candles before they burned down to the icing. That meant death. Candles burning down to the end, as in my
grandmother’s tumblers of candles, which could not be tampered with once lit,
memorialized someone’s death. And the Friday-night Sabbath candles that she
lit with her hands covering her eyes, and a shawl over her head, suggested to
me her irremediable grief, a pantomime of the loss of sight that comes to the
dead under the earth.
So I
blew for my life, to have some tallow left for the following year. My small chest heaved and I was glad for my
mother’s head beside mine, adding to the gust, even though it would mean I had
not done the job the way one was supposed to, with aplomb.
— sdh