I reworked the first scene of the play yesterday, then walked around Kendrick Pond twice with Maya. First loop—we discussed whether it’s more important to visit the mother who drives you nuts or stay home in case the son whom you drive nuts needs you.
Second loop was focused on what Maya should do for Stu’s upcoming 50th. It was late afternoon but the sun was lingering in the sky like a teenager defying curfew, which was good because Maya seemed to know everyone there with a dog and we had to stop and chat every 20 steps. Amazingly, she knew not only the names of all the dogs we passed, but also of the owners who stopped to talk. “Do you know them?”
“We met them last week here, remember?”
No. I never remember. Maya remembers everything. Birthdays. Lines from movies. Titles of books. Names. Even the names of plants and animals. She collects information, stockpiles fun facts about everyone she meets and creates a storied world filled with fascinating details and tidbits of trivia. She makes the banal interesting.
Maya wants to throw Stu a surprise party. I told her I thought he would prefer to let the day pass without notice. Stu had the misfortune of being born into this world minutes after Walter Cronkite informed the country that JFK had been assassinated. The news had spread throughout the hospital and everyone in the birthing room, including Stu’s mother, was crying while he was crowning. After the delivery, the doctor disappeared. Stu’s mother figured he stepped out to tell her husband that he had a healthy baby son. But that wasn’t the case. Stu’s father didn’t learn the news of his son’s birth for another two hours and the doctor wasn’t seen again until the following day.
Being born on a day of tragedy makes for a lousy birthday and Stu’s mother used to break down in tears every year during his birthday party, and for Stu, no matter how many times he’d blow out the candles wishing his birthday was on a different day, it came again and again on November 22. So now, understandably, he reviles his birthday and never celebrates. He’s made such a big deal of not acknowledging his birthday that it’s one of the few birthdays I actually remember, and every year I slip up and wish him a happy birthday by mistake and every year he tells me to mind my own business. “Elise, what is it with you?”
Maya is convinced he needs to get over his birthday issues. “It’s been 50 years. It’s time to celebrate. I want to go big,” she said.
“Why?” I asked her. “Why not just let him hate his birthday? Can’t some issues just remain issues? So what if Stu hates his birthday. Isn’t that his prerogative? I think he’d be happier ignoring his birthday or having a nice quiet dinner with just you and the kids.”
“He’s turning fifty. Fifty!” she said. “I’m not going to let this birthday pass like it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter if Stu doesn’t want it to matter,” I told her. I wanted her to see that maybe she wasn’t thinking about what was best for Stu. Maybe she feels the need to throw him a party because it’s best for her.
And to that, she said, “I want to do this because I believe with my heart and soul that he’ll be really happy once he sees everyone he cares about in the same room together. It’s going to be a love fest. It’ll make him happy.”
I want to believe her. Maya has an almost magical ability to heal people who don’t know they need healing and to help the people who do. Sure, she can be annoyingly heavy-handed about it, but she usually—not usually, she always seems to know how to help someone out of their rut. She knows what to do to get you to think a bit differently, to get you to shift your perspective, however determined and dedicated you may be to seeing things the way you want to see them. But this party for Stu. It feels all wrong. Why is she throwing this at him?
She tried to explain—although I think her story was more distraction than explanation (the magician’s trick)—by telling me about a girl in her kindergarten class named Candy Carmella. I don’t know if that’s her real name or if Maya invented a sticky toffee name so I’d remember it. Apparently, a boy in her class named little Jared Shithead—or something—saw Candy Carmella extract a booger from her nose and eat it. This was an event he decided was exceedingly newsworthy. As the conveyor of good gossip, little Jared Shithead ascended a few notches in class rank to most popular boy and Candy Carmella landed the role of class pariah. When the birthday calendar posted on the classroom wall showed Candy Carmella’s birthday was a few weeks away, word got out that the booger-eater’s birthday party was an event to be boycotted. Of course, none of them at that age knew about actual boycotts or organizing political movements, but essentially that’s what they were doing.
And then the invitations came. Maya was one of the three girls in the class who got invited to the class pariah’s birthday party. Maya and the other two invitees decided to counter-attack and whispered in voices that were meant to be overheard about how Candy Carmella’s party was going to be the best party ever and that only three kids in the class were lucky enough to get an invitation. One of the girls brought her invitation to school and secretly revealed it to one, then two, then most of their classmates—telling them, “I’ll show it to you, but you can only look at it for a second.” The kids got a sneak peek at a picture of a prancing pony wearing a tiara with little flickering lights. The birthday party fast became viewed as an exclusive event that only a lucky few were invited to. And, in fact, the three girls had a great time at the party—intimate gathering that it was. After the party, Candy Carmella was no longer the class pariah and while little Jared Shithead remained popular, his reputation took a bit of a bruising. But what really came out of this tale was that Maya, at the age of five, started to understand the power of reshaping a narrative and this is exactly what she wants to do for Stu.
I told her I still didn’t think the surprise party was a good idea.
“Noted,” she said.
I asked her what became of Candy Carmella.
She said she’s lost track of her, but little Jared Shithead is now the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Figures.