A Birthday Present From the Past

In a year of 366 blogs, it was small consolation that one of these would be easy to write.  Today is my birthday.  For the record, I am 54.  It was easy to say out loud, but seems so much more daunting to put in print. 

It used to be that birthdays were a big event.  As a kid, I’d wake up to birthday cheer—an entire household of people anxious to celebrate me.  There would be a lot of coy nonsense, such as my mother's saying something like, “You look different today!”  Sometimes I would have new clothes to wear, allowing me to go to school in an outfit no one had seen before.  It was a birthday ice-breaker.  “Is that a new dress?”  Oh, I got it for my BIRTHDAY!

I particularly remember my 7^th birthday.  I asked for a party at Holiday Park in Ft. Lauderdale.  By today’s standards it was nothing special, but I remember it’s being filled with great things on which to climb, including a large red locomotive.  My parents made dozens of sandwiches for my friends to eat—peanut butter, tuna and baloney—all on white bread.  I can still remember their kitchen production line, queuing up the sandwiches and wrapping them individually in aluminum foil before Scotch-taping a label to each one.  We sat at picnic tables while my father called out “Who wants tuna?” and then tossed sandwiches to each kid.  When there were leftovers, he entertained us by playing “I can eat this sandwich in [this many] bites.”  He ate one sandwich after another, starting with six bites, then five, then four.  When he got to three, he took half a sandwich, looked at it cross-eyed, and then shoved the entire thing into his mouth.

After that, I have few birthday memories except for 17, 30, 40, and 50.  For my 50th, my husband hired the Harvard Krokodiloes to serenade me a capella at a restaurant.  Swoon!  But the best of all was my 21^th birthday, and it had nothing to do with reaching drinking age.

Everyone grows up aware that they share their birthday with certain famous people.  I share mine with Prince Charles and Aaron Copland.   For the musical little girl I once was, I felt that these two men defined me.  A cliché though it is, most girls dream of meeting a real live prince and becoming a princess.  But for the aspiring musician in me, sharing my birthday with perhaps the greatest American composer was beyond inspiring.  It made me feel that music was my birthright, as if something about being expelled from the womb on that particular autumn day had determined my destiny.  Perhaps it did.

Fast forward to 1979.  I was a senior at Harvard, living in Kirkland House.  These days, Kirkland House is famous for having been home to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.  In those days, the housing system at Harvard was driven by student preference and Kirkland House was home to the jocks.  My excuse for living there is that, coincidentally, they were home to the best concert grand on campus, a gleaming Bosendorfer.

That year, when I turned 21, Aaron Copland was turning 79.  He had a history of affiliation with Harvard, and a long professional relationship with Leon Kirchner, who was also an American composer of note and one of my professors.  To kick off a celebration of Copland’s 80^th year (which began with his 79^th birthday), Copland made a visit to Harvard to participate in an event sponsored by the Office of the Arts.  They staged a “Conversations with. . .” setting where Kirchner and Copland talked for the cameras about the creative process, the signature sound of American Music, and Arnold Schoenberg.  We sang ‘Happy Birthday.’  It was a small, poorly publicized event that went practically unnoticed on campus, attended mostly by the press.  Incredibly, it was held in the Senior Common Room of Kirkland House where I lived.  I was asked to be Copland’s official host.

My duties in attending to Copland’s every need involved fetching him Perrier.  He would only drink Perrier, but I was only too glad to oblige this living legend.  I got to stand in the corner of the room during the press conference, where light bulbs flashed and reporters asked inane and non-probing questions.  “What do you think of Leonard Bernstein?”  “Did you ever meet Rachmaninoff?”  “Are you excited about turning 80?”

After the press conference, as I was collecting Mr. Copland to move to the main event—ensuring that he had the privacy he needed to attend to Nature's call—we had the opportunity to chat briefly.  I told him that I was studying music and played the piano.  He asked to look at my hands, which he thought were incredibly tiny.  It was a funny comment from a man who himself was very tiny—barely as tall as me at 5’2”.  I explained to him that while growing up he had been a great inspiration to me because, as it turns out, November 14th was my birthday, too.  “How old are you?” he asked, bracing visibly for my answer.  “Twenty-one,” I replied.  “Ah, to be so young,” he said.  He paused a moment, looking right into my eyes.  Without warning, he reached out and hugged me tight.  While still caught in the embrace, he whispered into my ear, “Happy birthday to you, too.”

I like to recall that conversation each year on this special day.  It was life-defining--a shared moment between randomly-connected souls.  It was then, as it is now, a gift that keeps on giving.