they say it's your birthday

And it is. Fifty-nine years old and sweating it, damn, sixty is too close.  My arthritic thumbs protest as I peel apples for Sonny's pie and I am thinking of a movie from the 50's, Marty, a black and white Oscar winner, starring Ernest Borgnine and he plays a lonely Italian butcher living with his widowed mother in the Bronx. Marty is a bumbling, homely sort of guy and Mom is a bitchy, unhappy critic who inserts herself into the lives of younger family members and then fans the winds of misery. There are no blue skies in this woman's aura. She is allowed to persist in this negative way because old people were revered in the day and matricide was illegal. In one scene she is sitting, in a rocking chair (duh) with her sister, another old lady and they are wearing the official old lady uniform: grey hair drawn back in a bun, black lumpy dress and thick stockings and huge crucifixes around their necks.  "Oh Bessie," she laments, "I am forty-eight years old and my time is past. I'm important to no one anymore."

My birthday. That means I get to order french fries and ask for a little packet of salt as well. I choose to celebrate with children because they understand the need for festivities and good things on this important day.  They will send me no birthday cards showing wrinkled women with sagging boobs and bonfire cakes and there will be no bottles of Geritol and X-lax in my gift pile. Instead we will sing loudly while the girl in the red and white checkered dress blows her oogah horn and announces to the room that it is indeed Dawn's birthday. "Do you want me to say another year older or  fifty-nine years old?" she asks.  Are you kidding?  Fifty-nine and gimme that free ice cream sundae.