Remembering My Childhood Birthday

Among many pictures I have scanned into the computer, I have several that I treasure. They are old snapshots taken at one of my long-ago birthday parties. Since October is my birth month and my birthday will soon be at hand, I find myself reflecting about the past. I look at the front room of our old house in St. Joseph, Missouri, at the gathered kids and cousins, and think about the changes since that time.

In the photographs, I am six years old. The year is 1967 and drastic changes in everyday life since then are notable. We - my guests and I - look like Norman Rockwell poster children in our simple dresses and the boys' plaid shirts. We look like what we are, what we were - boys and girls in another time when man had not yet walked on the moon and our innocence was intact.

We are baby boomers, the last tier of that famous generation. None of us wears trendy clothing, something that did not yet exist for children, at least not in our neighborhood. Our footwear is simple and runs to patent leather shoes and a few tennis shoes. Keds were the coveted shoe for kids, Keds and PF Flyers.

The group of children poses in the living room of our home in St. Joseph, Missouri. The room is neat, simple, and comfortable. Our one phone - a black rotary dial desk phone - is not shown but was near where the photographer who snapped the shot must have stood. The single television is as much furniture as screen and stands to the left of the birthday guests on four legs, wearing a wooden cabinet.

My gifts, as yet unopened, are piled on the coffee table. Most are wrapped in plain white tissue paper, something seldom seen as gift wrap in today's hectic, showy world. If memory serves, most of the gifts were simple too, things like a cloverleaf bracelet from the T G & Y, hair ribbons, a Donna Parker or Trixie Belden book, and a wind-up toy. One of my gifts another year was a discarded 5th grade English textbook from my Cousin Bill's school. I don't have the hair ribbons or even the bracelet but that book, discarded from Washington School, is on my desk. My connection to that old book is sentimental but it is also something practical that I still use. Even as a writer, I find few grammatical questions that I cannot answer from the pages of that book.

When I look at the old photograph, that moment of my sixth birthday frozen in time, I remember the way that we were and reflect on what a long way we have come since then. We have grown up and matured but it is more. The world around us and its trappings have altered as well and the life we knew then is not what my children live.

Of those children gathered, some are no longer with us. My cousin Mary Lou Sontheimer Clark lost a battle with ovarian cancer eight years ago. Another cousin, Joe, now lives in far distant Thailand. Those of us who remain have changed a great deal since that distant day. We are older and hopefully wiser. Then we were new wine and now we have been aged, made better in many ways.

The changes in our daily lives since then boggle the imagination. Cordless phones, cell phones, computers, the Internet, DVD's, and microwave ovens are just a few of the changes that I could not have even imagined then, on the sixth anniversary of my birth but times, like me, have changed.