Bungled Birthdays

Each November, a high percentage of my friends give me cards or gifts on my birthday. I don’t know how they do it on time so consistently. I have puzzled over this for years and came up with a list of possibilities:

1.      My birthdate (11-11) is easy to remember.

2.       I am unwittingly more vocal about my birthday than most people.

3.       I associate with people who A) are uber organized, or B) have eidetic memories.

4.       Remembering birthdays on time is normal.

That last point concerns me the most. I do remember my friends’ birthdays—usually a week late. Occasionally, the reason I have remembered a birthday at all is when someone says, “For my birthday this year, my husband…” And I stand there feeling small and then smaller, knowing I have done it again.

I want to honor my friends like they honor me. I want to be thoughtful and giving, so every year I turn over a new leaf. I add Remember friends’ birthdays to my annual goal list. Because of this, my January and March friends stand a higher chance of hearing from me on their birthdays than my unfortunate June friends or, bless them, my December friends.

I used to be a secretary with acceptable accuracy and believe that birthdays shouldn’t be harder to remember than paying quarterly taxes. I tried checking for upcoming birthdays at the beginning of each month like I used to do for taxes in the office. This almost worked for the entire month of January. Turns out that Barb’s birthday is too close to the 1^st, so I even missed that one. On another year, I wrote names on my calendar, which helped a little. But then, when I missed a birthday, the name glared at me from the page, adding guilt to grief and highlighting the old question: “How long after a birthday can you give a person a present?”

This year when I underlined and highlighted Remember friends’ birthdays on my Annual Goal List, I prayed about my problem. Almost immediately, I thought of the calendar on my phone. Being a pen and paper kind of girl, I do not use the calendar on my phone for my schedule. I hate seeing a month full of quiet gray dots that signify anything from “Lunar New Year” to “Host Hospitality.” (Do they make colored dots? They should. Gray dots for days I can ignore, blue dots for important events, and blinking red lights for birthdays.)

I wouldn’t have bothered trying to use my phone calendar except I heard it has those alarms you can set. Alarms are even better than blinking dots. I spent half my morning figuring out how to enter birthdays and set alarms and the other half feeling confident and happy. Smug, even. To the surprise of all my friends, I would clamber onto the highest plains of normalcy and remember birthdays like the best of them.

I gave Lydia Ruth chocolates on her birthday in February and invited Gail to my house on hers. I gifted Sunday school students with timely tokens of my love. This business of remembering birthdays gave me a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of overcoming a severe fault. 

On March 31, my phone dinged, notifying me of Lydiann’s birthday. I immediately stopped what I was doing and sent her a text. I love having people in my life who freely credit God for the redemption and deliverance He has given. Lydiann is that kind of person. I blessed her for that trait and sent birthday greetings. On her birthday.

Warmth filled my whole kitchen.

Then I received this response from Lydiann: “Thank you very much! I receive your blessing. Our story really is a story of redemption. My birthday is actually May 31 and not March 31. Did you see it somewhere that I would’ve made a mistake and filled it in wrong?”

I hadn’t. I crawled to the church directory and double checked her birthdate. She was right, of course. But my embarrassment was tempered by knowing that my system—even when flawed—was working.

On the morning of April 25, my phone pinged reminding me that it was Anna’s birthday. I love Anna. She is warm and friendly, fun to chatter with, has a child in my Sunday school class, and another one due to arrive any day. I wanted to be especially sure to remember her birthday this year. I was arranging books and crayon boxes in my class area at church when she walked in. This was my moment. I launched into a cheerful, “Dah-dah dahn dahn dah dah…” to the tune of Happy Birthday.

Anna certainly seemed surprised. She was stunned into silence and appeared startled. Puzzled, even. Her husband looked amused.

My confidence wavered. “It’s your birthday today, right?”

“No, my birthday is in December. December 2, to be exact.”

I felt betrayed. Crushed. My failproof system had let me down horribly for the second time in less than a month. This time, I didn’t know what went wrong. How could I have gotten the date mixed up to this gross extent?

And then I knew. Right date. Wrong Anna. The birthday girl lives in Oklahoma. My husband only knows her as “the cheesecake lady” because for my birthday one year, Anna sent me a homemade lemon cheesecake in the mail, forever cementing her position in our minds as one of the best cheesecake bakers and best birthday gift givers ever. Hers was a birthday I planned to remember.

I apologized to Anna-at-Church and crept back to my phone to add a last name to the notification.

I haven’t abandoned my new system, but I am eyeing it skeptically. What I need to do is awaken the secretary within me and devote an entire morning to my calendar. I want to verify that each benign gray dot holds accurate, complete information and includes all my friends. This should be good news for the December birthday people, particularly Anna who might receive not just one but two greetings from me in the same year.

In the meantime, my friends, happy birthday to you all!