The Birthday Book

 


Looking up from the computer, my eyes are drawn to a tiny book.

The size of a credit card, bound  in red leather the word  BIRTHDAYS embossed in gold on its cover, it sits beside the address book and parish magazine on the shelf above the desk.

It was a gift from a friend. A little book to note birthdays; a useful gift, a spontaneous gift given to me over a cup of tea in Cheltenham.

I smile to myself as I reach for it and turn to the date in September where in bold ink she  had marked her own birthday with an exclamation mark as  for many years I would send her card late thinking it  she was born in October.  Now that day is always remembered but no card ever sent as within weeks she succumbed to the illness that robbed her of  movement, her speech and then her life.

Opening the book at random in the second week in January, I see the  name of  someone I used to know but whose birthday I no longer bother to celebrate and turn swiftly on, my guilt sitting uncomfortably with me.

I turn next to March and I see the name of a friend who only last year was funny and clever and knew everything about bees. We met in India where she talked about her Durrell like life in Devon with emus and ostriches and goats and then, in a quirky coincidence I discovered she lived nearby. She died last summer and  her funeral was a day too wet for the bees to fly.

I wonder who feeds the animals now.

May 22nd, two birthdays listed here and another friend no longer alive. Another  funeral  with an unseasonably  late flurry of snow and a long drive home.  Two birthdays listed together ensuring the memory of the friend who has gone will stay forever partnered with the one who lives.

September 26th, his birthday marked by an initial as I need no reminder really but feel he deserves a place here too.

I look to see if my birthday is recorded knowing it is not as I have no need to remember this date. I toy with the idea of adding my name in case in years to come my book is found and  someone is curious about me. But not knowing who that might be, I decide to leave the page blank after all.

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