remind me of me

My most striking visual memory of attending a birthday as a child is formed from a photograph stowed safely in the large burgundy album stowed away in the bottom drawer of my mother’s dresser. In the photo I wear a baby blue and white sweat pant suit and sit atop a fiberglass ankleosaurus. Also riding the ankleosaurus are Keith, Lisa and Joy. At the time Keith was my best friend and I had secretly decided that I would marry him. Lisa, with her blonde ringlets and considerable novelty (Keith spent a great deal more time with me burying ladybugs in dirt piles, and wrestling his cat, Missy, out of his second story window) was my chief competitor. Joy, Lisa’s little sister, was a relatively unimportant part of the social hierarchy. We are not all smiling. Someone looks away distractedly. Another frowns because of an earlier event, or perhaps because they are sliding off of the dinosaur. My memory is not sure which expression should be assigned to which face. But I believe myself to be smiling. I can’t remember anything about this party. I can’t even begin to guess where the event was held.

This image popped into my head when I attended my cousin Jesse’s belated fourth birthday party on Saturday. I decided, yesterday, that children’s birthday parties are terrible. Preschool children don’t care about the cake, the food, each other or even the gifts. The party is for the parents who sit around distractedly talking to each other about the children they watch weaving in and out of the molded plastic play gyms.