Birthdays Are Meant To Be Celebrated Quotes

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

In the restaurant kitchen, August meant lobsters, blackberries, silver queen corn, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. In honor of the last year of the restaurant, Fiona was creating a different tomato special for each day of the month. The first of August (two hundred and fifty covers on the book, eleven reservation wait list) was a roasted yellow tomato soup. The second of August (two hundred and fifty covers, seven reservation wait list) was tomato pie with a Gruyère crust. On the third of August, Ernie Otemeyer came in with his wife to celebrate his birthday and since Ernie liked food that went with his Bud Light, Fiona made a Sicilian pizza- a thick, doughy crust, a layer of fresh buffalo mozzarella, topped with a voluptuous tomato-basil sauce. One morning when she was working the phone, Adrienne stepped into the kitchen hoping to get a few minutes with Mario, and she found Fiona taking a bite out of red ripe tomato like it was an apple. Fiona held the tomato out. "I'd put this on the menu," she said. "But few would understand.

maybe he hasn’t been judging Carl for other reasons. Maybe Owen doesn’t judge him because Carl returns the favor, by not judging a secret Owen felt safe confiding in Carl. Even if that theory is wrong, I still need to talk to him. Because Carl’s also the only lawyer I know in town. I knock on the front door, but no one answers. Not Carl, not Patty. It’s odd because Carl works from home. He likes to be around for his kids—his two young kids—who usually nap at this time. Carl and Patty are sticklers for their children’s schedule. Patty lectured me about it during our first night out together. Patty had just celebrated her twenty-eighth birthday, which made the lecture all the more enjoyable. If I was still able to have children—that was how she said it—I was going to have to be careful not to let them rule the roost. I’d have to show them who was in charge. That meant a schedule. That meant, in her case, a 12:30 P.M. nap every day. It’s 12:45. If Carl isn’t home, why isn’t Patty? Except that through the living room blinds, I see that Carl is home. I see him standing there, hiding behind those blinds, waiting for me to go. I knock on the door again, pressing hard on the doorbell. I’m going to ring the doorbell for the rest of the afternoon until he lets me in. Kids’ naps be damned. Carl swings the door open. He is holding a beer; his hair is neatly combed. Those are the first indicators that something strange is going on. His hair is usually uncombed,

Sure, she was going to turn eighteen in less than a year. She’d been in the system long enough to know that eighteenth birthdays weren’t marked by celebrations. When the checks stopped coming, she’d be on her own. “Aging out” of foster care meant becoming homeless. She’d heard stories of kids ending up in jail and hospital emergency rooms, selling drugs, living on welfare and food stamps. How desperate did a person have to become before they broke the law to survive? For now, things were good, and she didn’t want to mess that up.

The crescent kick is one of the most difficult kicks to master in Tae Kwon Do, but when executed properly, it is one of the most dangerous.  Detective Sergeant Jamie Johansson had been practising it for nearly six years, and despite being only five-foot-six, she could comfortably slam her heel into the ear of someone that was over six feet. And now she had it down to a science. She knew she couldn’t do enough damage with a punch to put someone down if she had to, but a well-executed crescent kick would do the job. Especially from her lightweight trail boots. Her partner made fun of her for wearing them — said that detectives shouldn’t be wearing hiking boots, especially not in the city, but they were tough and she was as fast in them as she was in her trainers. Which she thought made them a lot more suited to tracking down scumbags than Roper’s black leather Chelsea boots.  He disagreed. She didn’t really care.  Smoking thirty a day meant that he wasn’t going to be doing much running anyway. ‘Come on,’ Cake said, jerking the pad. ‘Again. Like you mean it.’ She flicked her head, throwing sweat onto the matt, wound up, lifted her leg, snapped her knee back, and then lashed out. Her shin smashed into the training pad with a dull thwap and she sank into her knees, panting.  Cake clapped them together and grinned with wide, crooked teeth. ‘Good job,’ he said. ‘You’re really getting some power into those, now. But make sure to ice that foot, yeah?’ She caught her breath quickly and stood up, nodding, strands of ash-blonde hair sticking to her forehead, the thick plait running between her lithe shoulders coming loose. ‘Sure,’ she said, measuring her trainer. Cake was six-two and twice her weight. He was Windrush, in his fifties, and ran a mixed martial arts gym just near Duckett’s Green. He was a retired boxer turned trainer that scored his nickname after winning a fight in the late nineties on his birthday. When the commentator asked what he was going to do to celebrate, he said that he was going to eat a birthday cake. Everyone thought that was funny, and it stuck. He had a pretty bad concussion at the time, which probably contributed to the answer. But there was no getting away from it now.  He pulled the pads off his forearms and rubbed his eyes. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, looking over at the clock on the wall. It was just before seven.  He yawned and stretched, cracking his spine. The gym wouldn’t open until midday to the public, but he lived upstairs in a tiny studio, and he and Jamie had an arrangement. It kept him fit and active, and she could train one-on-one. Just how she liked it. She paid her dues of course, slid him extra on top of the monthly for his time. But he said that

It was common courtesy. A birthday was a birthday, and that meant it got celebrated on the day of birth. None of this waiting for the weekend nonsense. That was weak-kneed hippie talk. Everyone has a job to get to, now take your damn shot.

In order for me to get those moments that leave me filled with gratitude I have to be willing to first show up, and then show up again. Next step is making sure I’m the kind of friend I’m hoping for in the first place. It’s the reason I keep a pile of birthday, condolence and get-well cards sitting next to me. Lowers the excuses for sending out a note to celebrate or just let someone know they’re not alone. Meant a lot to me lately when people sent me cards after my sister, Diana died. Or the times I’ve carried a casserole to someone’s door, or had dinner delivered – on me. Or the times I’ve bought candles, or tea from a friend’s new company, or I’ve gone to see plays or cabaret performances, or bought CD’s or books, or countless other moments just like those. I wanted to encourage and celebrate, as well as sit alongside a friend who’s struggling with a loss or a challenge. It all starts with heading out my door and being open to whatever greets me along the way.

On the twenty-sixth of January in 1988, Australia was celebrating two hundred years since colonization. I was eight years old at the time and could not begin to comprehend the complexity of the day and what it meant to the long-suffering indigenous people of our country. Back then, it was a day viewed as celebratory; the one narrative pushed by the government and media of the time, parroted by our teachers gushing: What a special day it was! A birthday, they said. That, my eight-year-old self could understand.