Birthday

Dylan Thomas’ beautiful Poem in October contains these lines:

I wasn’t born in October, but I claim this for my birthday poem anyway, because the images are so beautiful.  Thomas wrote this for his own 30th birthday, but I’ll take it for my 74th.  

It occurred to me that the fact that I was born at the end of August means that my mother, of blessed memory, spent the last, heavy, exhausting part of her pregnancy in New York heat and humidity, climbing the three flights to our apartment with two and a half year old Shayne toddling along.  I have always known, since I knew anything, that my mother was entirely delighted by my birth, but I hadn’t really thought about how incredibly glad she must have been to no longer be pregnant. Five people lived in that third floor walk-up before I arrived, my parents, my Mom’s parents, and Shayne. I always believed that all of them were entirely delighted to have me join them. My grandfather, Zayda, said that I had a face like a little nut.  It sounds much more charming in Yiddish.

What a gift it is to be joyously welcomed into the world.  I have carried that feeling of being welcome, of bringing joy, all through my life, even through the hard times.  I was born into a rejoicing world.  The war was fading from memory and Israel had just become a state.  We had lost distant relatives to the Holocaust, but all of our close relatives had come through safely, in America and Israel. The country I was born into was on top of the world, and the country that my Zayda and mother especially had dreamed of had been dreamed and fought into reality. The Marshall plan was launched to help get Europe back on its feet.  Truman pulled off his surprise win over Dewey and the Democrats took control of both houses. Velcro and Scrabble were both introduced.  Who could ask for a better time to be born?

I believe my mother wanted children more than she wanted anything else in her life.  I don’t know if she knew then, or guessed, that her own mother had been compelled by my Zayda to have several abortions, or if that knowledge would have been part of why Mom was so thrilled to have her own kids.  But I do know that we were what she wanted.  And she gave us the extraordinary gift of never wanting us to be anything but who we were.  She was fascinated by us, by every thing we did or tried to do.  She had hopes for us, certainly.  She hoped we would be healthy and happy, she hoped we would be safe and live well.  But she never hoped we would be lawyers or musicians or wives or mothers, only that we would be our own best selves.  

Thomas ends his birthday poem with these lines:

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning

It is all I can wish for on my birthday.