Letter from Home: October

On turning 50

That’s a photo of me and Carson. We’re both wearing flower crowns our neighbors made for us. In that photo, I’m about twelve hours into being fifty years old. My childhood friend Spencer took it. I have a lot of feelings about all this.

Last Saturday it was my birthday, my fiftieth birthday. I was born in 1974. If the setlist of the ad-hoc band who played in our barn was any indication, that was the year Court and Spark came out. That record is old. The mellifluous jazz-flute passages all over it summon up memories of childhood as well as any old photograph could. I am as old as Court and Spark. Let that one sink in.

Because I have the same birthday as Carson — she was born exactly a year after me — I have not had my own birthday in over twenty years now. I am always sharing it with my wife. It is not a bad thing to share such an milestone anniversary with the person you love the very most. In fact, it’s pretty sweet. The years (and its seems like it’s most years) where you’d prefer not to put such a fine point on becoming more aged, you at least can use the day to fete the other person and their becoming more aged. However, we agreed about a decade ago that for the big birthdays, the decade birthdays, one of us should step aside and pretend like it’s not our birthday and allow the other one to have their moment in the sun. This year was such a year.

Carson kindly deferred her own birthday so that I could have mine; she threw a party for me out here on our farm. It was very sweet and a little overwhelming. I drank four beers and made myself monstrously hungover the next day. This was the picture on the invite and it was a picture that was hung around the property and it has me, in the lingua franca, feeling all the feels:

If your definition of “a band” was overly generous and all-inclusive, you could say this was my first band. We organized to perform at a neighborhood event called “Hopper Days,” in which a bunch of grown-ups got together to commiserate the destruction of their gardens by the scourge of grasshoppers that descended on Helena backyards every August. I guess that grasshopper scourge doesn’t happen anymore, which is weird. Thanks, climate change.

It was chiefly a garden party, I suppose, and I’m sure there was shitty beer aplenty and people sneaking off to smoke “reefers” — the sorts of activities you’d imagine a bunch of post-hippie adults doing in the early 1980s — but there were also all kinds of competitive events for captured grasshoppers: obstacles courses, races, beauty contests and the like. I have such a distinct memory of my friends and I discovering that grasshoppers turned bright red when you boil them, not unlike shrimp, only to have our efforts rebuffed by the judges of the beauty contest who stated that dead grasshoppers were disqualified. Children are savages.

What could The Babies have sounded like? That photo captures it better than any kind of video would: we are rocking out, we are smiling, we are having fun. There’s Margaret Reagan in the background, looking like she’s being positively transported by the music. It all would suggest a show. But there definitely wasn’t any sound being produced aside from some atonal singing from some ten year-olds and the thud of a laundry basket being beaten by a stick (that’s Spencer, who took the picture at the top of the post).

I think The Babies was created mainly as a way to convince my friend Mark, who had cable, to watch MTV with me at his house during the day. “We need to learn songs for the band!” I remember telling him when all he wanted to do was go run around outside. The only “song” I remember learning was “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen with “Hopper Days” substituted for the chorus lyric. My mom recalls us howling out the words “Mommy and daddy are all crazy now” which must have been Quiet Riot’s “Mama Weer All Crazee Now.” She remembers this because half of the adults at the party were all going through some kind of separation or divorce; was this their kids’ howl of objection? An early sign of their eventual trauma? No — we were oblivious; we were just watching MTV, man.

Who is that kid, forty years ago, up there in front of the stage? The one wearing that rad sleeveless shirt with the Japanese dragon on the front that didn’t even belong to him, he’d convinced his friend to let him wear it because he was going to be the singer, the frontman? Would he recognize me? Would he look at the way I’d done it and think I’d done it right? Somehow, the silence of the photo is more exciting, more tantalizing than anything I might’ve achieved in the years since then. It’s all promise, all attitude. It’s the perfect melody of a stick being strummed, an ice-scraper being shredded upon.

Anyway, here’s to another year around being hurled around the sun. I’ll get a birthday reprieve next year; I’ve got to figure out what to do for Carson on the occasion of her 50th. Maybe a Babies reunion will be in order — in which case I better get to watching some MTV.