Officially An Old Person
Another birthday came and went on October 9, and it again crept up on me unawares because there was no change of fall color to clue me in. In fact, this might be the hottest and most humid time of the year, as we're in the middle of Guam's wet season. I am now 44, an Old Person of Note, and someone who loves his students even as he has no idea what kind of cultural framework they have. And vice versa.
I had a wonderful dinner with my friends the Pangs, formerly of Kaua'i, Hawai'i, and now of Guam. Lisa is married to Patrick, who's one of the pharmacists on island, and is a native Hawai'ian. His mother is French, his father is Chinese, and he has the kind of exotic looks one might expect from such a marriage. Lisa is originally a Seattlite (Seattler? Seattlinian?). Their four children all grew up in the middle of the Pacific, so that their frames of reference are skewed a bit: Neil and Jason, for example, have never been on a roller coaster at, say, the Cedar Point amusement park. But they have ridden an elephant in Bali. So there!
Lisa cooked a lovely chicken dinner with spinach, wine and cheese, and lemon teacake. Neil provided one of the Harry Potter videotapes so that I can catch up and be prepared for the new movie that's opening in November and to which we will all go. Pottermania is big even out here, which gives you a sense of the global reach of Hogwarts. Jason provided comic relief, as he always does.
My mother sent me a check which I happily spent on a new running tank top, and I got best wishes from siblings and such via the Net. I don't pay a great deal of attention to birthdays any more and really haven't for years, though I have friends who are deeply invested in them. I suppose there is a certain amount of sense to that--it isn't every day that you get to be the focus of all the attention, after all--but I'd just as soon drink a wee glass of sherry at 9:45 pm (when I was actually born) and be done with it.
Birthdays are a big BIG deal on Guam. A first birthday party is a major celebration, and not for kids exclusively. It's not uncommon to throw a party for 200 people, and the kids are really auxiliary to the whole shebang. One does provide entertainment for them, of course, in the form of face painting or clowns or something, but all the family friends, parents, grandparents, godparents (a very big deal on very Catholic Guam), cousins, neighbors, aunties and uncles, show up too. This means that children's parties must also include lots of barbecue, plenty of beer, a band--everything that you'd have for a fiesta. Then you do it again on the fifth birthday, maybe the tenth--all the milestone birthdays. Typically, Guam turns innocuous days into massive celebrations, and if I'm here long enough I just might be willing to throw a bash for 200 on my fiftieth.
Comments