I called my sister first thing this morning and discovered that she was throwing me a virtual birthday party on line. Twenty six attendees! I said I was tickled pink and it’s true. The Internet is really a marvelous thing, isn’t it?
Happily, I am off on Fridays, so I didn’t have to scrub toilets on my birthday. I’ve already received some birthday cards but none today. I did however get my Newsweek, my New Yorker, and a travel supplement of the French newspaper Le Monde, from a French cousin. It is the perfect reading material for standing in line or eating alone--which I don’t have to do but have come prefer, after an incident with Hippie, who was becoming my chowmate. Yesterday he took out his dental plate as he ate and licked off of it an offending food particle. I told him he was being gross and he reacted disingenuously. "What? I’m just licking my plate, what’s the problem?” I was emphatic that it was disgusting, and if he rejected that assessment than I would simply ask him as a matter of courtesy that he refrain from doing so in my direct presence. At that point, Earl stood up and advised me: “You are so anal sometimes. Nobody’s perfect!” I was aplopletic. I was anal for objecting to someone licking his false teeth?! Can the criteria for what constitutes gross behavior get any lower?
Earl marched off, with a "talk-to-the-hand" gesture. Later, back in the dorm, I was about to light into him, but he was laughing too hard. “Of course, it was disgusting!” he giggled. “I just knew it would get to you.” He wasn’t referring to Hippie's grotesque behavior getting to me; he was referring to his own "anal” comment. I was relieved to know Earl was teasing, he does it fairly often, faking snits then dissolving into a smile and a wink. Every morning, I can depend on a sneer at waking up. I sneer back; we delight in pretending to hate each other.
And yet I know there is some bite to his bark, however playful. I have often been accused of holding those around me to unrealistically rigid standards. You can imagine how poorly that plays in prison. It is true, actually, and I would have to point in the direction of my mother if we were looking for the source of this inheritance. Of course, my mother and I generally see eye-to-eye on these things, but I would venture to say that like me, she has often enough felt the resentment of others when they sensed that they were being silently critiqued. I have noticed, often enough, a veritable conspiracy between friends to knock me down a few pegs. It’s always cloaked in good-natured kidding, but I’ve seen glee when they manage to get a rise out of me. And then reveal that the perfectly plausible source of my consternation is fictional, made up just to see how irritated I’d get.
My mother’s best friend and one of mine, Claudine, writes me that her non-observant children nonetheless fast on Yom Kippur, to honor their grandparents, lost in the Holocaust. I’m not fasting – prison is deprivation enough- but my birthday does seem like a good opportunity to practice some Yom Kippur-like self-examination. I like having standards; but I don’t like being perceived as priggish or self-righteous. So my vow this coming year, which will change dramatically for me in just a month, will be to keep my standards--but worry more about holding myself to them than others.
A psychic once told me to “stand in the light.” That sounds just easy enough, and just hard enough.
MCO 2004
P.S. This was my birthday horoscope in the local paper: Your work may be thorough and painstaking, but it pays off in a grand way this year! The next seven weeks teach you that you can depend on loved ones to help you as long as you spell out what you need. Love signs are Aries and Leo. Your lucky numbers are 9,20,45,11,and 28.
