ninanevermore | Monday – I Used To Be a Star (Really)

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On the day you turn 40, you wake up with the same thought in your head that you had on the morning after you lost your virginity: "Funny, for something everyone makes such a big deal out of, I don't really feel any different. Shouldn't I feel wiser? More worldly? More experienced? More something? Because I don't."

If you bother to reflect back on the previous decades at all, you find yourself thinking the same thought you had immediately after losing your virginity: "Wow, that didn't take long at all."

Okay, so in my case, he was a virgin, too. The difference is that yesterday morning I was thinking this about 4 decades worth of time, whereas in the case of my virginity it was more like 40 seconds (if that). But still, I had the same thought.

I wandered out to the living room to enjoy a little silence and solitude before my pre-school aged son woke up and my husband got home from work. The phone rang. It was my mother-in-law calling from the nursing home to wish me a happy birthday.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"40," I said.

"Oh! 30!" she said. She's a little deaf and has had a couple of strokes, so I assumed she misheard me.

"No, 40."

"That's what I said: 30!" I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I finally figured out I was being teased.

"Okay, I'm 30…for the 10th year in a row," I agreed.

"That's right, hon! I hope you have a wonderful day. Go out and do something fun."

A little while later, Jeff came home.

"Do I look older?" I asked.

"You never do," he said. "Cute!" he said, stepping back to take a look at me. I was wearing a little tie-dyed sundress his mom had bought me from a shop called Hippie Chick Tie Dye in a little town up in Idaho, make by a real live aging flower child who had moved to the mountains for her going-to-seed years. I'd slept in it, actually. No doubt, what he though was so cute was that I was not wearing a bra. He'd easy to please, my husband. Never mind that my hair was mussed and I had no make up on, I was standing in my bare feet wearing a sundress and no bra on my 40th birthday, and if he said I was cute it was because he thought I was cute. He doesn’t lie about stuff like that.

I pretended to read something while he rushed around the house, looking for a bag to put my gift into. The bag he found was actually not a gift bag, but an Abercrombie & Finch shopping bag that his mother had sent something home with us in at some time in the last 20 years. Still, it had a nice picture of an attractive couple on it in a tasteful black and white photo, so I'm not sure if he realized it was a shopping bag rather than a gift bag or not. He's not really the sort to care; after all, it was a bag and it was the right size. He even found some tissue paper to wad up and stuff in the bag to obscure the box inside. It was a little stereo dock for my iPod, because I'd been wanting one. And here I thought he didn't listen.

When my son woke up, Jeff asked him if he was ready to give me my present.

"Yeah!"

I was told to stand in front of the sliding glass door and close and not peak. My son was instructed to pull to cord to open the curtains. He grabbed the wrong cord at first, so it took a few moments to sort out why the curtain wouldn't open and reveal what was on the patio.

"Pretty!" I said. It was dark green vine with waxy leaves on a trellis, covered with fist-sized pink flowers.

"I bought it at the hardware store," my son told me. He loves going to the hardware store with his father, and seemed to think that anything he picked out for me at such an amazing place as that should impress me plenty.

"Cool, thank you!" He'd picked it out himself, I learned. He'd looked at all the plants in the garden section before settling on this one. I wondered if the deer were going to eat it, but banished the thought. If they do, they do. Until then, it's lovely.

And that was that. A few cards, some greetings, a couple gifts. I don't eat cake, so there wasn't one. If I were still friends with Patty, I'd have gone out the night before and probably closed down some bars of nefarious reputation, but I'm not, so I didn't.

It was the quietest birthday ending in a zero that I can remember. Sometime during the day, as I contemplated all the implications of turning 40 (with a 4 year old in tow, no less), I remembered something that I'd once heard while listening to NPR: I am made of stardust. So are you, for the matter. So is my dog, and my house, and my tie-dyed sundress, and my little boy and the vine with pink flowers that he gave me for my birthday. Every molecule in our bodies and in the world around us was once part of a star that exploded back untold millenniums ago, when the universe was younger and humanity was not even a spec on any as-yet unborn horizon.

Thinking about this always makes me feel like I am glowing, ever so slightly. The idea always makes me smile.

40 years is not such a long time, when you think about it. Parts of me have been around for much, much longer. So why am I walking around with this silly grin now that I am 40 years and one day old? Don't let my common exterior fool you. I'll have you know I used to be a star, baby.

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Current Mood: stellar
Current Music: Saber Dance by Khachaturian