Year me out

Birthdays used to follow a familiar pattern. I’d spend the day riding bikes and getting up to some general shenanigans with friends, and when I got back home there’d be toys and cards stacked on the coffee table like a display at Toys R Us, minus the creepy giraffe. My mother would film my reactions as I opened presents. This foreshadowed the YouTube trend of posting videos in which people react to various stimuli, like music or old video games. If I’d been born a couple decades later, I could have been an internet star. A missed opportunity: Yet another incentive to transition into the cranky old fart phase of my life.

At some point, birthdays became way more chaotic. As a child my circle was tight. All my friends knew each other, they all knew my parents, my parents knew all the other parents, and the only people resting outside of this insular sphere were the relatives who lived out of of state --  the ones who sent me Christmas cards with obscenely large checks in them. (Thanks, Uncle George.)

As I grew older, that small sphere became several overlapping spheres. Not all of my friends know each other; I can’t just invite them all over for a pool party and call it good. Their ages vary, their political affiliations are all over the map, we have different common histories, and the mix just wouldn’t make sense. Plus I don’t have a pool. So there’s that.

Instead, my birthday has gradually morphed from one big event into several smaller events taking place over the course of many days. It’s exhausting. Nice, but exhausting. In a very real sense, and in more ways than one, getting older is going to kill me.

Festivities this year were divided into three parts, with Phase 1 kicking off at a Chinese buffet in Auburn. The parents wanted to take me out, and when they ticked off a list of possible restaurants, the buffet was clearly their preferred option; you could see it in their eyes, the way they glowed with thoughts of congealing pork juice and sugary dough balls. Something about Chinese buffets attract the older set -- maybe it’s the limited interaction with servers, the whole get-down-to-business mentality on which these places are built. Either way, I didn’t really care. I was hungry and wanted food, and pretty much anything would have sufficed. A bag of marshmallows, a jumbo squeeze-bottle of Cheez Whiz, whatever. So I picked the buffet.

What I failed to consider was that my parents have a hard time understanding accents, and have little patience for those who can’t understand theirs. I'll admit I occasionally struggle with accents myself, but there are subtle ways to handle it, without causing offense or straining international relations. Dad in particular does not take the subtle route. His strategy in making himself understood is to ratchet up the volume until his drink request is audible from small fishing settlements in northern Canada. Ordering a Heineken last week, he sounded like a man shouting instructions to a battalion through a failing walkie-talkie. I spent much of dinner trying to tuck my head into my body in turtle-esque fashion.

Phase 2 of my birthday weekend was quite chill, a low-key hang session with my friend “Greg.” Greg and I go back almost 30 years -- we met and became buddies in grade school -- so he’s the perfect candidate for mutual reminiscing on birthdays past, someone who’s been around for most of them and has witnessed my slow transition from quiet, unassuming nerd to quiet, chronically assuming dweeb. Friends like this are perfect for helping a person mythologize certain aspects of their history; sometimes an event becomes more real if you’re given the context and language to turn it into a story you can tell at backyard barbecues. Yet every year this exercise becomes ever more disconcerting, because it’s a reminder of just how many birthdays are behind me. Slowly, our conversations have gone from “Hey, remember when we went clay shooting in the sand pit?” to “Hey, remember when our backs didn’t hurt?” Someday, the answer to that latter question will be “no.” Cue ominous music.

“Karen” was the centerpiece of Phase 3. She’s another friend who goes back decades -- I have a lot of those -- and she’s my heavy metal buddy. It’s important to have one of those if you’re a metalhead; it’s a much-maligned and often misunderstood musical genre, and if you don’t know at least one person who’s on the same wavelength in that regard, you spend a lot of time alone watching nostalgia documentaries on VH1. She took me out to dinner and a local metal show, and lemme tell you, if you think the big-name acts are ridiculous, try banging your head to the yokels who carry around their own drum heads. General rule of thumb: If you’re a metal band who’s too small-time to have roadies, your music probably sounds like two milk trucks crashing into a collapsed suspension bridge.

All three phases were terrific, a sustained streak of unabated awesome. In aggregate, they were also draining. As lucky as I am to be surrounded by people who care, there’s something to be said about the simplicity of childhood, with celebrations concentrated into a single event -- Slip ’N Slides, chocolate cake and plastic lawn chairs, the whole production. One of the things that’s nice about being a kid is the naive belief that everything will always stay the way it is; we’re oblivious to time’s fracturing effect. We don’t yet realize, in any real sense, that friends move away, parents grow old, and circles of influence become splintered by politics and religion, careers and choices. All that exists is the present moment.

Luckily, because my mother was once obsessed with her camcorder, those moments are preserved for posterity. And they’ve recently been digitized. You know what that means: YouTube stardom, here I come.

Cray crays

Something about me attracts the crazies.

Maybe “crazies” is a bit harsh. “Eccentrics” may hit closer to home, but any way you want to define them, they have a way of finding me, perhaps sensing I’m a bit eccentric myself. It reminds me of the way a morsel of food will attract insects even when there are no insects in sight. I am officially a slice of watermelon. Never thought I’d say that.

Evidence of this came last week in the form of a transient woman whose crusty bun of hair looked as though it might crumble like soup crackers in strong crosswinds. I was relaxing in Portland’s Monument Square, chomping on a nectarine, when a young man approached asking if I would sign a petition. The woman -- I’ll call her “Penelope” -- sauntered over and began engaging with the man. It was a bad sign when she didn’t know Susan Collins and Angus King were her senators. It was an even worse sign when she sat on the bench next to me and started talking about how she rummages for food in other people’s trash.

Petition Man quickly got our signatures and hoofed it, practically leaving a cartoon puff-cloud behind hm as he set land speed records racing down Congress Street. He and I both knew that Penelope would soon be launching into breathy and meandering discourse on all things transient; she exuded this quality immediately, much the way Kryptonite emits a lime-green glow of radiation. Petition Man, needing more signatures, had a pretense for leaving the scene. All I had was a nectarine. Lucky me.

Penelope settled deeper into the bench as her eyes assumed a far-way look, the kind that usually precedes a long philosophical rant. What choice did I have but to sit there and listen? My lunch hour had just begun, and though I could have lied and said “Sorry, I have to get back to work,” chances are she would have stayed on the bench for a few minutes, started walking again, and spotted me finishing my fruit while hiding ineffectively behind a hot dog vendor. I’m always caught in these situations, and so I stayed put and listened patiently while sucking on the pit, secretly wishing I had the power to morph into a bird and fly to safer ground. Nova Scotia, perhaps.

What a tale she told. Penelope seemed less a hard-luck case than the hobo type, deliberately choosing a transient lifestyle for reasons that are still unclear to me. Maybe it’s the romance of it. Originally from Massachusetts, she spends the warmer months roaming the northeast, camping and squatting and eating cheap calories in the form of discarded bread and bad lettuce. She seems to live in some alternate, concurrent reality, a Mad Max dreamscape running parallel to our own workaday lives. Her story would have sounded almost quaint if she hadn’t smelled like old pottery. Maybe these types of stories are more charming when you don’t feel like burying your face in a bucket of potpourri.

And I just sat there and took it. There’s a quality these people sense in me; maybe it’s that I don’t talk much. They look at me and see a giant ear they can squawk into. Which, come to think of it, is a half-decent idea for a cartoon character: Eary McLobe, a superhero whose power is soaking up the ramblings of loquacious drifters. Gotta copyright that before Marvel pounces on it.

To clarify, my unease had nothing to do with Penelope being disadvantaged. I donate to food shelters and drop bills into buskers’ guitar cases, and feel the requisite liberal dismay when poor folk are unfairly targeted by bad public policy. My beef was that she was both chatty and insane. Much like the woman who approached me in almost the exact same spot some three weeks previous.

Same park, same time of day, different bench. Turkey sandwich this time. I was staring into space with dead bird in my mouth and thinking about nothing at all when another woman, I’ll call her “Fiona,” settled in next to me and started massaging her calf, which was pockmarked with mosquito bites and looked like a deli ham. With no preamble -- no “Hey, howya doin’” or “Mind if I sit here?” -- Fiona told me all about her knee surgery, and how much it hurt, and how entertainment options in Portland were limited for a woman of her age. Apparently her idea of entertainment is finding random turkey eaters and picking up on conversations they didn’t even realize they were having. Beats going to clubs, I guess.

Fiona is one of those people who’ll expound at length on her own travails while expressing no interest in the lives of her listeners. These people are amusing, but exhausting. In about five minutes I knew about her family, her living situation, her hobbies and her medications. If I’d had a second sandwich I might have been able to stick around long enough to grab her social security number and the passcode to her apartment building. I said about five words, none of them revealing, but in retrospect I probably should have said more. I missed an opportunity to concoct a flesh-and-blood fictional character from scratch. A more inventive mood might have produced Randy Shephard, an amorous farmer whose indiscriminate fornicating practices have resulted in a stock of very shy and confused cows.

Buried underneath my bemused frustration is the lurking suspicion that maybe I’m one of the crazies myself. In 30 years I may well be interrupting people’s lunches to expound on my theories about using wormholes to travel through time. I’m strangely OK with this. As long as I still have access to fresh nectarines, it’s a fate I can handle.