How do you get on the birthday list? You exist in my vicinity. How do you get off the birthday list? You don’t. It has been compared to both the Mafia and the communion of saints, and you can play the deck from either side.
It began on my own birthday. It was one of the milestone years that reminds you the veil is thin, and this mortal cord is, at best, a strand of capellini. I am talking, of course, about seventeen.
My father gave me a ballpoint pen filled with yellow happy faces suspended in gelatin. My mother dyed my oatmeal green to remind me I was born on St. Patrick’s Day. My English teacher climbed up on my desk and performed a jig that dislodged the drop-ceiling tile. All I could think about was the coming famine: after adolescence, no one would remember my birthday.
Eighteen would get its due, and nineteen and twenty might merit a few drops of food coloring. Twenty-one could be like six all over again, only with considerably more tequila. But as a doofus with no intent to inebriate, I would be lucky to get one last card with a hamster dancing to “Hot Stuff.”
While Mr. Wallace called the maintenance man to repair the ceiling, I turned my new pen over and over, watching happy faces jostle in trapped mirth. I tried to remember the last time I remembered my parents receiving birthday cards. I wondered if Mr. Wallace had received a single dancing hamster in the last thirty years.
“Mr. Wallace, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, birthday gal!”
I was about to pose a question that could initiate the apocalypse. Civilization survived on an implicit agreement that these words must never be uttered to persons past age twenty-one. Judging from his resemblance to Rod Stewart and the fact that he had been teaching English since the Diplodocus roamed our suburb, Mr. Wallace was surely out of warranty.
There was no telling what might happen if I asked, much less if he answered.
“When is your birthday?”
The maintenance man gasped. I wondered if he might crawl into the ceiling to escape. But Mr. Wallace grinned and threw his arms over his head like an orangutan. “July fourteenth!”
And so, it began.
“Mr. Wallace, July 14.” He was the first entry on my spreadsheet. I added my parents, my grandparents, and myself. I erased myself. I added my friends. I added Tornado Ernie, the ambulatory rutabaga who delivered the local weather. He had recently mentioned on air that it was his birthday, “although nobody celebrates a guy who’s wrong 49% of the time.” That was about to change. Everything was about to change.
I wrote to the reverend. I used my happy face pen. Since it was an exquisite writing instrument from Dollar Yard, its gelatin was evaporating, so all the happy faces huddled like refugees at the bottom.
“Pastor Postma, I love that our church bulletin lists the birthdays of Sunday School students.” I prayed my words would land correctly. “Verily, Jesus welcomed the little children.” My mother had supported this entire enterprise. “But Jesus was always concerned for whoever received the least attention. I think He would be sad that we stop celebrating birthdays once people grow up.”
My petitions were two: (1) that I be granted permission to survey the congregation for birthdays (month and date, year optional) and (2) that Pastor Postma support my efforts by announcing his own birthday from the pulpit.
The spreadsheet grew. “Rev. Jud Postma, M.Div., D.Min., December 29.” The associate pastor was January 3rd. My father said someone should pursue doctoral research on the correlation between Presbyterian ministry and the sign of Sagittarius.
Goodie Wood, who ran the church thrift store, was born on May 25th, 1929, “because there ain’t no shame in having been around since Enoch!” Mr. Mueller, who was cast as Zacchaeus in the Easter pageant due to the qualification of being a wee little man, was April 28th. Ernestine was a cumulus cloud affixed to a woman, and she was born on October 11th. Mrs. Van der Noot, whose rendition of “How Great Thou Art” caused all the infants to simultaneously become possessed, came into this world on November 4th.
The aged and cardless were willing to tell me their vintage everywhere. The marching band director withheld his datum until I promised to practice my flute at least one day a year. The principal could not remember the last time anyone had asked her the question. Mr. DiPietro, who taught Earth Science and looked like Al Pacino if Al Pacino favored cargo pants, asked if I would make cake.
“I was thinking I would send you a card.”
“Well, I want cake.”
If not for Mr. DiPietro, I would never have learned the word “gibbous,” the phase of the moon when it looks like it has had a few extra helpings. The marching band director played the theme from “The Godfather” every time Mr. DiPietro walked by. Mr. DiPietro had a sufficiently buoyant sense of humor that he threatened to call the Italian American Defense League. I brought Mr. DiPietro cupcakes, the class sang, and I learned what it would look like if Al Pacino cried.
My mother started to worry about my stationery budget. “How many are on the list at this point?”
“One hundred twenty-eight.”
“Honey, this is going to get expensive.”
But what were my ShopRite wages for, if not to change the world? The manager of the Produce department was born on August 19th, and he could pick out a honeydew so sweet you would have a mystical experience. The front-end supervisor wouldn’t give me a raise until I enforced the fifteen-item limit and stopped getting into long conversations with customers while my line snaked back to Dairy. But her birthday was January 24th, and she wore Eeyore sweatshirts, so the entire Hundred-Acre Wood popped up to wish her a Pooh-fect birthday.
By the time I got to college, the spreadsheet swelled to three hundred former children. They were forty-eight and fifty-six, seventy-seven and “north of ten.” They were not going to Carvel for Fudgy the Whale, and no one was giving them Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle balloons. They might not remember the taste of their name in icing, or the fondant flower as big as their first. They might not even remember me. But they would know that some doofus was glad that they were here, with the googly-eyed cat stickers to prove it.
My parents attempted an intervention.
“Honey, at some point, folks should graduate from the list.” My mother was reasonable. “Or at least you can send them an email. They’ll still appreciate being remembered.”
“Goody Wood doesn’t have email.” My argument was airtight.
My father had a philosophical question. “Is there anything someone could do to get off the birthday list?”
I couldn’t believe the man who gave me the happy face pen, which was now one congealed uber-smile, would ask such a question. “Of course not!”
“What if they don’t respond for five years?”
“What does that matter?” Generally, no one responded to my cards. This did not bother me. Every true revolutionary must trust in the long arc of history.
“Ten years?”
“So what?”
He took another angle. “What if they move to Yemen?”
“I’ll get international postage.”
“What if they commit crimes against humanity?”
“I’ll send their Spider-Man cards care of the Hague.”
Finally, he asked the question I did not like to think about. “Sweetie, what if they write back and say, ‘who the hell are you?’”
I hoped this would never happen. I hoped that, although I never told them I was March 17th, 1981, they would have some memory of my face. It was okay if they had to squint. Somewhere back there, a dingus with frizzy bangs and a disproportionate interest in Hobbits and cats was excited that they were born. I couldn’t give them parents who put green food coloring in their oatmeal, or a pastor who called God “The Great Big Love.” But I could put something neon in their mailbox, and maybe that would be enough.
I knew my answer. “I’ll remind them. I’ll keep sending cards.”
Thirty years later, the birthday list persists. I have faced the deaths of people I am glad were born. I send cards to their spouses. I ask the spouses their own birthdays. I surprise endocrinologists and self-checkout supervisors with a question that remains risky. They all tell me the answer. They never respond to the cards. It was never the point.
There was one exception. Darren and Polly were falling in love when I met them, fleece-draped forty somethings who looked me in the eye. They did not talk about their divorces, but a color guard of children filled their pew. I was midway through divinity school and dimly aware that I did not want to be a pastor. Polly said I was a powerhouse. Darren said that what was for me would not pass me by. When my friends got pulpits, I got a job writing PR for an animal shelter. Darren and Polly sent me a two-foot-tall “Hallelujah!” card that required fourteen dollars in postage. They got married. I sent birthday cards. They did not respond.
I had been at the animal shelter for seventeen years when I received a letter, not a card, from Darren and Polly. Their stationery was covered in sparrows. They used a manatee stamp. They were still married. They took turns down the page, her curlicues going back and forth with his block letters. Life was still silly. It was important that they tell me one thing. Darren wrote the words. “Your love does not return void.”
You don’t get off the birthday list. I’m banking on this.
ANGELA TOWNSEND works for a cat sanctuary. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Offing, Peatsmoke Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, and World Literature Today, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College.
CARL SCHARWATH Scharwath
