My Birfday, 2020

Today is my birthday. I’m not observing it the way I had expected to. 

Until a month or so ago, the plan for this weekend had been for my mother and her sons (my two younger brothers and me) to gather at a downstate casino resort, where for two days we would play board and card games in our hotel suite, stuff quarters in the machines at the video arcade, and enjoy great meals and talks together.

We’ve done this roughly half a dozen times over the years, with variations that included beach and mountain resorts . . . including the memorable night of March 1, 2013, when my brother Toby and I got stuck in the snow overnight and had to walk 16 and a half miles out the next day (you can read the whole saga here, with photos, if you click on each image for my detailed comments). Sometimes I even took a cassette tape recorder to interview Mom and capture her memories.

But only a couple of these gatherings have coincided with my birthday. In the past, we’d meet in the off season between November and early March, if memory serves.

This year, I’m home with my spouse and dog, where I’ve largely stayed for the past 16 days. We’ve gone on two long walks together, on Sunday the 22nd along the river (with the dog) and Wednesday the 24th up the hill (without). The last time I made a significant grocery run — to Whole Foods in the Pearl District of downtown Portland via the streetcar — was Friday the 20th, a little over a week ago. I also climbed the steep hill to a friend’s home that afternoon, as I related in my second journal of the plague year report. Since then, shipments from Blue Apron, Thrive, and Amazon have kept us supplied with necessities.

I think I can safely say this won’t be a particularly joyous or celebratory birthday . . . but it’s certainly going to be memorable. I pondered the matter last night while walking the dog after midnight, and realized I don’t recall all that many of my past birthdays.

I couldn’t call to mind a single one before college. Birthdays were a family affair, not occasions for inviting friends over, even in high school. We had cake and gifts, but I don’t remember any of those specific occasions. I had no interest in alcohol as a teen; I didn’t attend a single “kegger,” a popular social event among my peers in a rural southern Oregon town, particularly since it was illegal. That’s partly because I also had no interest in driving: I not only lacked the vehicle many of my classmates had access to, but I wouldn’t have been able to operate one if I had.

By the time I got to college at the other end of the continent, I had developed an intellectual disdain for the whole concept of a birthday. There’s nothing objective to distinguish this one from the one 364 or -5 days before; the earth, sun, and stars are definitely not in the same places as they were, even in relation to each other. It’s an entirely artificial, self-referential human construct, I reasoned.

Sounds fatuous now, but I really didn’t require (or miss) the public observance, or presents, any of it, really. Separated from my family and previous circle of friends by thousands of miles, my birthday became a kind of secret that was mine to keep or share with the world — or each individual person — as I chose.

Thus, ironically, my first birthday in college — number 19 — is the first I can clearly remember. The 28th of March often fell in the middle of spring break, and for that first vacation, I took a train down to Washington D.C. to stay with my Dad’s cousin, a career diplomat with the State Department who was between postings to such locations as India and Costa Rica. (He would complete his career as second in command at the U.S. embassy in East Berlin in the 1980s.)

I visited the Smithsonian that week, and swung by the offices of The New Republic magazine to obtain the autograph of TRB (Richard Strout), whose columns I had been reading for many years. The only signature I would have craved from that staff even more was that of their movie reviewer, the fiercely intellectual and deprecatory Stanley Kauffmann, but he was based in New York. On the night of my birthday, Cousin Alan took me to an Indian restaurant (a new cuisine to me) with some friends of his, and it was only over the entreés that I revealed it was my birthday — when no one could do anything except offer their good wishes.

I think on my 21st birthday, graduate student friends may have taken me for a drink at The Spinnaker, one of those slowly revolving rooftop restaurants that was at the top of the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, overlooking the Charles River and downtown Boston. (Apparently, it’s now a non-revolving private event space.)

From there, it’s mostly a blank expanse in my memory for birthdays across my 20s, when I was a poverty-stricken office worker in Boston, then an impoverished news reporter in southern Oregon. I met Carole shortly after I settled in Portland in early 1991, at the age of 32.

In contrast to me, Carole was accustomed to making a BIG DEAL of birthdays, and preferred to receive the same treatment. Early in our relationship, when we were living in her condo at NW 19th and Hoyt (only a block north, as it would turn out, from Temple Beth Israel synagogue, which she would join after converting to Judaism four years later!), she provided a spectacular example.

Early that March 28th, she directed me to a classified ad in the paper, which offered birthday wishes and directed me to walk four blocks west to Kornblatt’s Delicatessen, the New York-style deli on NW 23rd. There, I had breakfast with Ken and Nancy Klos, who handed me a gift card to Powell’s Books and dropped me there.

After some browsing at Powell’s, I was picked up by the late Ann Rasmussen, one of Carole’s earliest Portland friends, and driven across the river to watch a screening of Disney’s “Aladdin” at the Lloyd Center (which would place this in 1993, because the animated feature in which Robin Williams made such a splash as the voice of the Genie had been released that winter). Movie over, Ann took me back across the Willamette to hand me off to a friend at Music Millennium (I believe; it still had an outlet at NW 23rd and Johnson, which closed in 2007 and became the Fireside restaurant), and another gift card, whence we strolled to a small bar on NW 23rd, where he treated me to several strong margaritas made to his specifications.

Then we tottered back to the condo, where everyone had gathered for the party. (The day’s perambulations had been planned by Carole to keep me away for the amount of time she needed to prepare the premises, get the caterer settled, and gather all the guests, you see.) That was one heckuva party . . . which may have played a big role in softening me up for a proposal of marriage (we won’t say whose, though you can read the entire story, including our separate honeymoons, here).

On my often-limited salary (as well as an equally meager imagination and lack of practice), it was a challenge for me to reciprocate. But in 1992 I spirited Carole away to the coast for a weekend at our favorite place, the Sylvia Beach Hotel, where we celebrated her birthday in the Agatha Christie Room — complete with two bullets embedded above the headboard, wingtip shoes peeking out from under the window curtains overlooking the Pacific, a glass eyeball in the rolltop desk, and a bottle of poison in the bathroom cabinet. The journal for that room, in which guests write about their stay — rather fancifully, in many cases — made for memorable reading.

In 2005, I was back on a steady financial footing after having left the City of Lake Oswego the previous year, worked temp assignments for a while, and eventually landed what would be (up to now) my last full-time job, as a secretary-receptionist for a small law firm downtown, which lasted until the last big recession.

For Carole’s birthday I booked a private trolley ride on the then-not-even-four-year-old Portland Streetcar. It had opened a 4.8-mile counterclockwise loop between PSU and our Northwest Portland neighborhood in July 2001, and another 0.6-mile spur down to Riverplace at the top of South Waterfront just a month before.

I arranged for a bunch of Carole’s friends to board a train at the maintenance shop under Interstate 405, and she and I caught it — ostensibly while trying to find a restaurant where I had reservations — at 18th and Northrup after everyone else was aboard to welcome the birthday girl. That was a nice surprise . . . and neither of us could have imagined I would be working on that same train as well as all the rest of them on an expanded streetcar system of 7.2 total miles more than nine years later . . . and that we would move to South Waterfront after a 10-year pause in a downtown apartment.

That place on SW 11th and Jefferson was an easy one-block stroll from West Café, handy for birthdays during that period, such as this one in 2008.

For my 50th birthday, Carole organized a sumptuous party for about 40 guests at Serratto, a fine Mediterranean restaurant at NW 21st and Kearney, and after dinner some of us walked the three blocks south to Voicebox for karaoke. That was 2009, and three months later I would lose my final full-time job. Our household income dropped 22 percent that year, and another 17 percent the year after, but shocks like this may compel you to take greater risks and innovate.

As I related here more than two years after that, while pulling unemployment, doing temp work, and looking for another full-time position that never showed up, I also got an agent and started looking for commercial video and indie film work. From home, I did free-lance editing and proofreading for various firms, and eventually became a permanent go-to wordsmith for two companies out of Seattle: AudienceBloom and Sesame Communications.

Three years after losing my law firm job, I hired on with Portland Walking Tours. Five years after, I became a part-time, flexible-hours customer service rep with Portland Streetcar.

In short, I became a poster boy for the gig economy, juggling part-time work with the streetcar and walking tours, free-lance work with Sesame and AudienceBloom, occasional standardized patient jobs at Western States Chiropractic College, Oregon Health & Science University, National University of Naturopathic Medicine, and Linfield College of Nursing.

I also did occasional commercial video work, indie film acting, print modeling, and even hand modeling and voiceover work. I landed a guest-starring appearance on the NBC series “Grimm” in the spring of 2012. If you’re not familiar with this part of my life, see my demo reel (the actor’s equivalent of a portfolio), my commercial demo reel, one of my first excellent short films (“A Hole Story”), and my favorite web series appearance (“Vancouvria: Big City Survival Class”).

None of this has been terribly remunerative, but it was usually fun, and it brought a whole new circle of acquaintances across the city and the region into my life.

We’ve had to scale back our birthday celebrations. For a while, I had a run of birthday brunches at Veritable Quandary, in 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014. That remarkable establishment, much loved by longtime Portlanders, was closed and demolished three years ago to make way for the new county courthouse, currently nearing completion.

Relocated to South Waterfront, Carole organized a party in the common room of our apartment complex in 2016 (with another trip to Voicebox afterward), and last year for my 60th, we had a bash at The Growler Guys, a neighborhood taproom.

Nothing like that today. All the city’s bars and restaurants are closed, except for takeout (and the latest reports are that many places who tried it have found it’s not working for them, anyway.) I can’t shake hands with anyone, or hug anyone. I can’t accept anyone’s good wishes in person because they can’t come out to play.

But think how much harder this self-quarantine period would have been for all of us in the 1980s (when we couldn’t talk to one another online or by video) . . . or in the 1990s (when retail grocery outlets were only just beginning to attempt home delivery and certainly were not capable of responding to an instant nationwide demand . . . and even the 2000s, before Blue Apron, Home Chef, Plated, and the other pre-prepared meal services.

I’m still receiving people’s warm birthday greetings online; I’m almost compelled by circumstances to spend hours reading and writing, two of my favorite activities; and I’ve got a captive audience for my long-running, but historically low-traffic blog.

So I’m not gonna complain.

A Courvoisier VSOP after another great meal

at Veritable Quandary, 2013