Summer
Summer has always been synonymous with my birthday. The late July blooms of hydrangeas, heady with heat and pulling down the plant. Most of my friends would be away and my birthday would be about family. I liked mini-golf and the movies and the community pool. I wanted Halo Pub’s ice cream and Rita’s water ice and a cake baked by my mother. I loved going out for Chinese food for dinner, especially Tiger Noodles in Princeton. But other birthdays were most memorable because of stops at Wegman’s for muffins and strawberry shortcake. Thinking back, they’ve blended together, but they’re so distinctly New Jersey.
Since I’ve lived in the UK, I’ve still spent two of my last five birthdays back home in America. Because it’s summer. Because I can. Because I’m usually not working. Because my son’s not in school. Because summer is liminal. My birthday is always in this nowhere land of time, and it feels wobbly this year. I feel wobbly.
(For this birthday, by the time this newsletter goes out, we’ll have gone to Dublin for a weekend, but I need more than a couple of days to write that Substack. That’ll be next month’s newsletter!)
When I think of turning 40, I think of when my mother turned 40. We went to a crumbling resort in the Poconos, Tamiment. We went there often, sometimes having family reunions there, sometimes bringing family friends. I remember a night where we were the only ones who showed up for karaoke and so we sang songs the whole night, shamelessly.
It was falling apart but it still functioned like a resort. The carpets were old and stained, but there was bingo every afternoon, led by a man who reminded me of Bob Barker (the host of The Price Is Right, for those who weren’t obsessed). The walls were slightly yellowed from when smoking was allowed, but there were paddleboats, and, in the winter, a mountain with fake snow that you could take toboggans down. It felt rich and rundown at once.
When my mom turned 40, it was 1994. Twenty years after Tamiment’s heyday and 11 years before it was mostly demolished to make way for condos that still haven’t been built. But the rise and fall of the Poconos is not what this post is about.
She took us all to Tamiment, and the rule was, we could not mention her birthday. We could not celebrate it. No cake. No singing. Couldn’t say, “Happy birthday.” Nothing. She would go into the vacation 39 and come out 40, and who would know when it even happened. And then it would be done.