Nothing Can Trump My Birthday

Ever since I can remember, birthdays have been hugely significant for me. My birthday, that is.

From turning 1 year old and singing "Happy Birthday" aloud atop my Grandpa and Grandma Rellihan's dining room table while standing beside my birthday cake (yes, I knew all the words and the melody), to running in the brisk autumn morning air of various Austin neighborhoods in my twenties and thirties and shouting to random folks who were innocently raking leaves into piles on their front lawn, "It's my birthday! Have an awesome day!" as I enthusiastically fist-pump the air and jog on by, birthdays have always filled me with jubilation. Some would say this enthusiasm is really just the way I've always woken up: annoyingly happy. But for me, birthdays have always exponentially amplified my customary level of joy.

I'm one of the lucky ones who has had more surprise parties than any one person deserves. For my thirteenth birthday, Mom and Dad throw a surprise party at our house after a Friday night basketball game. This surprise nearly gets dismantled (by me) because all I want to do is go home, shower and hang out alone in my room and write in my journal (which I did a lot when I was thirteen and fourteen).

Little do I know there is a plan to keep me away from the house for a while so my family can get everyone there and prepped for my surprise. Mom and Dad inform me that my friend Gina will be taking me home after tonight's game, because Mom has left something at work and needs to run by St. Mark's to pick it up. My friends Gina and Katie attempt to carry out their part of the plan by inviting me to the Independence Square for pizza. It is one of those invitations that would have sounded great any other night, but on this night, all I want to do is go home. Having pizza on the square sounded horrible to me, so I fib when my friends invite me to join them.

."Well, thanks, but I think my mom wants me to come home right away so we can do something together as a family tonight," I say, rolling my eyes, as if to indicate that this is a super annoying request from my mother. "Do you mind just dropping me off at my house?"

Gina stumbles a bit in her response, questioning me and awkwardly prying, "Are you sure? I mean, can't you come for a little while?" as she looks sideways at Katie, both of them likely questioning whether they understood their pre-surprise instructions.

"No, I'd better not. I think my mom probably wants us all home to do stuff together tonight. Maybe we could do something next Friday," I reply, hoping this will satisfy her desire to have me in tow at the pizza parlor.

"Um. Okay. I guess." Gina responds. Her "I guess" sounds more like a question.

Seeing that their finely orchestrated maneuver was foiled by my lack of interest, my friends have to stall by taking an extraordinarily long time in the locker room, hoping they can buy enough time for my parents to get things prepared for my entrance, which basically entails shoving dozens of friends and my huge-ass family like sardines into our finished basement so they can all jump out and shout "surprise" once I finally arrive home and make my way to my bedroom downstairs.

Gina and Katie's improvised second attempt is a success. When we finally make it home from the gym, I'm surprised like I've never been surprised before. We eat the world's largest chocolate chip cookie cake and vanilla ice cream, and laugh about how hard it was for my friends to keep me distracted and away from the house long enough. 

Little do the party attendees know how very much I want them all to go home.

Since my 13-year old surprise party, I've been surprised at the turn of every subsequent decade milestone. My mother is to thank for this, and the surprises just get better and better every decade. My 50th, however, was thrown by my Seattle best friends, in honor of me and my friend and fellow Scorpio, Rainier. I'm pretty certain it was the finale as far as my birthday surprises, not because I plan to leave the planet anytime soon, but because it will be hard to top its swanky James Bond theme. Besides, I think Mom deserves to retire from her surprise party planning after having gone above and beyond for her eldest child every decade for all of these years

I have no significant  birthday milestone this year, but I have a special celebration when my beautiful little sister, Julie, and her friend Mike visit me in Austin. 

Mike and I share the same birth date, and Julie thought it would be fun to treat him to a long weekend in the Texas Hill Country while also celebrating alongside her big sister, honoring two of the people she loves all at once. I love this idea. They arrive. Our adventure commences, but not without incident.

Julie and Mike stay with me for the first few nights of their visit, and as we are waiting for my girlfriend to arrive and join us for a movie and dinner at an Austin original, the Alamo Drafthouse, Julie and I get dressed. 

Julie is seated on the floor in front of my full-length mirror as the last remaining rays of sunlight light up her beautiful face (Julie has always only applied her makeup in natural light).

"Juice, do I look like Mr. T with this necklace on?" I ask, holding out a gold circular pendant which is adorned in the center with a gray polished rectangular stone on a gold chain hanging around my neck.

She looks at me through the mirror and states, "No, you look like you're in a bizarre cult. Or like you're getting ready to announce, 'Hang on a moment, Captain Kirk, while I contact Zlog on my chest plate medallion.'"

She says this in all seriousness and goes back to applying her mascara. I laugh and walk to my closet as I unclasp the necklace to hang it back on its hook. She's always been my voice of reason.

On our way to the cinema, Deborah and I ride in the backseat of Julie and Mike's rental car, a brand new Mustang convertible. It's cold, but we have the convertible top down for the novelty of it. Deborah and I snuggle together and enjoy the ride. We arrive, the movie is good, and we decide to ride home with the top up so we can stay warm since it's now several degrees colder than when we arrived at the theater.

Seated in the backseat, with the nylon convertible top only inches from my head, my knees crammed into the back of Mike's driver's seat, and my seatbelt strapped tightly around my chest and waist, I become painfully aware of how restrained my body is. The car roof begins to feel as though it is inching closer and closer to the top of my head.

My heart begins to pound incredibly fast, and I can't fill my lungs with air for the life of me. In an instant, I convince myself that I am going to die.

I frantically mumble, "Oh God," as I try to create slack in my seatbelt strap, hoping that doing so will allow me to breathe.

Deborah turns to me and says, "Honey, what's wrong?"

When Julie also turns back to me from the front passenger seat after hearing my knees start to bang on the back Mike’s driver seat, her face seems only a few inches from mine; the car now feels like a tiny room in a fun house, distorted and squeezing in on me. 

Julie sees the look in my eyes, and in a calm yet urgent voice asks, "Née, is it...?"

I barely nod my head once, feeling my body preparing to claw its way out of the vinyl convertible top, and respond, "Yes. Oh, God. Please let me out of here!"

I compulsively unsnap my seatbelt and lunge forward into the only open-air area of the car, a horrendously tiny space between the driver and passenger seats. Now I feel like a caged wild animal as both seats seem to squeeze me like a vise.

"Julie!" I say frantically, at a volume that is not my inside voice.

Julie knows these panic attacks first-hand. I used to think she was bordering on lunacy when she would describe them to me. I'd actually respond incredulously, "That sounds horrible, Julie. But I don't get it. Why don't you just take a deep breath and remind yourself that everything is okay."

God, I know now that she must have wanted to punch me in the face for such a callous response to what I now know to be a terrifying feeling of utter dread and fear.

Mike brakes from reversing the car, but there's no further movement to let me out of the car, likely because the poor guy has no clue how to respond to my growing anxiety. But each time I attempt to take a deep breath and can't, I grow more rabid in my desire to eject myself through the soft top of the car, and though I'm doing everything in my power to convince my myself that I am okay, Mike has no idea how close he is to being face-planted onto the steering wheel as I shove the driver's seat forward in a panic-stricken attempt to free myself from my imprisonment behind him.

"She's not kidding, Michael. Let her out," I hear Julie urge through the deafening ringing of fear in my ears.

Mike throws the car into park, opens the door and leaps outside. With near vampire speed, I am right behind him.

After a few paces up and down the row of parked cars and feeling the cool breeze on my skin, I am able to fill my lungs with air, and all begins to become right with the world again. When I think of shoving myself back into what felt like a vacuum-sealed package, I become concerned that I might have to walk home in high-heeled boots.

I return to the car, where Mike has stood outside watching my every move to make sure I'm okay, grab him by his arm and say in relief, "I'm so sorry, Mike. Thank you. I'm all good now. Would you mind if we rode home with the top down?"

It's about 5 degrees colder than it was two and a half hours ago, and we are flat-out freezing now, but the rest of the passengers in the car gladly concede to a frigid drive home if it means they don't have to witness me freak out again.

The next morning, I wake in customary joy to the new day. After kissing a sleeping Deborah on the shoulder, I gleefully exit the bed and make my way to the kitchen to prepare coffee for the three wonderful people still asleep in my house.

As I make bullet coffee for my guests, they each begin to stir. The November sun streams through the window sheers, infusing each room with an unseasonable freshness of spring and the first light of a new day. 

My house guests join me in the kitchen as we discuss last night's movie, and the entertaining post-movie episode of acute anxiety. 

As Deborah, Julie and Mike laugh about the savage nature of panic attacks, I smile as I push down on my espresso AeroPress plunger with what seems like my entire upper body weight while my chin rests atop my hands, unaware of the pressure building in the chamber of espresso grounds and steaming hot water below, until the vacuum seal fails. 

As I struggle to figure out what has just happened, my entire face feels as though it is melting, especially my eyeballs, when suddenly it registers that the nerf-gun-popping sound and the slosh of thick liquid (along with the scalding feeling of all the skin above my shoulders) means the AeroPress has just exploded all over my face and neck.

I touch my face in horror, scurrying to wipe the scalding hot coffee grounds that have collected with volcanic force beneath my eyelids. I am aware that the only sound that has yet escaped my mouth is a subtle, "Oh no. This isn't good," as I hurriedly turn toward the sink to somehow get my burning eyeballs under a running stream of cold faucet water. 

I hear the voices of three very concerned people, uncertain as to whether they should perform first aid, offer words of comfort, or express their terror at the very real possibility that I've just suffered third-degree burns to my face (and, holy crap, my eyeballs), while also restraining from laughter at the sight of my face, hair and the entire white cabinetry and countertops covered in an extraordinarily large amount of wet coffee grounds.

Once my eyes, face and neck are cleared of seething grounds, and we assess that the burn marks on my skin can likely be soothed with jojoba oil instead of a trip to the ER, we file the incident in the growing archive of bizarre Jenée occurrences, while we enjoy our coffee and together plan our day in the Hill Country before leaving Mike and Julie in Wimberley for Mike’s birthday weekend.

While in Wimberley, we take a trip down the lane upon which I lived between 2004 and 2008 (which also happens to be the same road that houses the resort where Julie and Mike will stay for the weekend). 

We come upon the ditch that I fell into in 2007 while walking home from the Wimberley square, gazing up at the stars and sipping hot chocolate. 

It is a beautiful autumn night, stars thick and plentiful in the sky. I am walking home after having dinner alone on the Wimberley square. After each sip of my hot chocolate, I tilt my head back and look upward to the beauty of the cosmos as I continue walking. 

I've traversed this lane hundreds of times in the past four years of living in this quaint little village. I know the bends and the straightaways of this road on any night, so the fact that it is now dark makes me no less certain of my footing. I am unaware that this night is a looming exception. 

As I stroll down the lane in my star-gazing stupor, hot cocoa in hand, I begin to sing. I can't for the life of me recall the song I am singing, because what happens next sends everything before this moment to that part of my brain which houses all things irrelevant.

Suddenly, the earth opens where it should have met the strike of my right foot, followed closely by my left, on pavement. Instead, there is no surface upon which to continue my one-foot-in-front-of-the-other cadence.

I am made painfully aware that when earth opens beneath one's body, it causes that body to contort and grope the air in a frenetic panic to locate something solid to land on or to grab. 

I have no idea what my body looks like in this awkward instance of free-falling. All I know is that my body lands as a sequence of joints and bone (starting from my right ankle and heading upward) upon an extremely hard and ridged surface, gravity making any kind of graceful landing impossible. I see nothing but darkness as this is happening. 

I become additionally and painfully aware that I am falling more than three feet into a ravine. The thud of each body part echoing into the night in progression is accompanied by a guttural grunt escaping my esophagus. 

Before I know what has just happened, I become acutely aware of the wet leaves and mud beneath my sprawled forearms, the feeling of the first layer of skin having been shaved off of my right wrist, both elbows and knees, the instant bruise and goose egg forming just beneath the right side of my chin, and an undeniably painful throbbing in my right ankle.

I try to move, to position myself in any other way than how I've fallen in this current posture of pure pain. To no avail. I can't lift my upper body; both of my elbows feel broken, and something sharp stabs me in the back each time I try to raise myself to get some sort of glimpse of my surroundings. 

I try to move my legs. My left leg moves just fine. My right leg, however, is overcome with severe pain if I I attempt to move my toes. My right hip bone, I'm now aware, feels as though a jiu-jitsu student has been using my torso to practice sidekicks. 

What just happened? Where in the hell am I? 

I manage to turn onto my back, wet leaves now soaking through my light jacket to my skin, and I begin groping my pockets for my phone. It's not there. 

I remember it was in the breast pocket of my jacket, so I roll back onto my belly (not without more intense guttural noises) and begin groping the wet ground above and to the side of my body. My fingertips explore the ground as though touch is the only one of my five senses still intact. 

Concrete. I feel the damp hard surface of concrete. I'm lying halfway on a bed of ridged and uneven concrete, and the leaf-topped ground that begins where the concrete ends. Now I understand why I could hear my bones thump in the night, and why most of my joints have so little surface skin left on them. 

"I have to get out of here. Where is my phone?" I think to myself, still feeling as though touch is my sole functioning faculty. 

Prostrate on the ground, as though I'm making a snow angel backwards, I grope the earth with my arms fully extended, realizing that my phone likely flew from my pocket and landed beyond my immediate boundaries.

I can't locate my phone. My hips are hurting badly. I turn onto my back and look up at the star-filled sky, unsure whether to laugh or cry. I have leaves in my hair. 

I sit up and reach forward to touch my throbbing right ankle. 

Oh my God! Is that an ankle?! 

The deformed protrusion that was once my ankle is swelling so much that my shoe feels like a tourniquet. I can't get my shoe off fast enough.

Realizing that my ankle is getting worse, I do the only thing that makes sense to me in the moment. I yell for help.

"Help! Please help! I've fallen and I can't..." 

Oh brother. 

Okay, shouting into the dark night is futile. I roll over and stretch my body as far as I can in the hopes of locating my phone. I finally find it leaning up against the dirt wall of the ditch. I also find the barbed wire that I now realize was keeping me from raising my upper body. 

I dial my landlord, who lives not far from the house I am renting. I know that if I tell M.F. and Bill (M.F. stands for Mary Frances) that I have fallen in a ditch, they will come and retrieve me.

I get ahold of M.F., but rescue is not as imminent as I had hoped. They are in Austin attending a gala, and they won't be able to get to me for at least 45 minutes even if they leave right away. She instructs me to sit tight and that she will phone me back in a few minutes. 

I'm not going anywhere. My only option would be to crawl up the lane to my house, which is set back in the woods, and down a long gravel driveway. Crawl, that is, if I can make it out of this ditch. 

This visual of me crawling up the lane makes me laugh. As if sitting wet and battered in a ditch isn't enough to laugh about.

Suddenly, I see the brake and reverse lights of a truck just up the lane, coming from our neighbor Jim's driveway. I begin pondering how to get my phone to light up or flash in S.O.S fashion (this is way before iPhones with flashlight capability). 

Instead, I begin yelling again. The reverse lights continue coming my way, until the truck slows and finally stops above me on the road. The passenger window rolls down. 

Jim is leaning over into the passenger seat, shining a flashlight and peering down at me. 

"Well I'll be! I thought M.F. was exaggerating. You really are stuck in a ditch. How'd you get down there, girl? My, my! And she says you think you might have really messed up your ankle. Ouch."

Jim's niceties typically consist of zero eye contact and a simple hand wave from across the street. Tonight, he decides to have an entire conversation with himself as I sit wet and in pain inside a ditch that I can't crawl out of. 

"Thank goodness you're here, Jim. I was looking up at the stars and apparently veered off course," I say, praying he will soon exit his truck cab and give me a hand out of the ditch. 

He does just that, but instead of offering me a hand, he climbs into the ditch and lifts me in An Officer and a Gentleman fashion onto the asphalt road, then hops out of the ditch and lifts me into the passenger seat of his cab. 

Jim drives me to my house, helps me walk into the living and prop my leg up while he prepares ice packs for an ankle that now looks the size of a football. He then walks back to his house to get Advil, since my medicine cabinet contains nothing but tinctures and natural remedies. I am in so much pain, I'd take heavy narcotics if he offered them. 

Once he returns, Jim cleans the wounds on my wrist, elbows. and knees, and sits with me as we talk in-depth for the very first time. We talk until M.F. and Bill Johnson drive up about 30 minutes later.

The Johnsons did in fact leave their gala just after phoning Jim to retrieve me from the ditch. They said they knew I was all alone in my Wimberley surroundings, most of my friends living in Austin and those living in Wimberley being so far down the Blanco River they'd have taken as long or longer to get to me. 

Dressed to the nines, Mama and Papa Johnson drive me to the San Marcus hospital so that medical personnel can tend to what we all think might actually be a broken ankle based on its size and the fact that moving my toes causes my body to lurch upward as if I'm going to launch into orbit from sheer pain.

The Johnsons wait with me for hours, as severed fingers and gaping wounds get first billing in a bustling emergency room. We laugh about my trip down the lane and a few other memorable moments I've had since joining the Wimberley village, and they even bow their heads in prayer and give thanks to God that I wasn't hurt worse than I was in my fall. 

My ankle ends up being an outrageous sprain that in the coming days makes me actually wish it was broken. Every time I stand, the blood rushes down and pools at my ankle, causing the worse surge of pain through the fragile soft tissue of my lower leg. I do everything in my power to refrain from screaming out the long version of what most people associate with M.F. Johnson's first name. I fail miserably several times.

Julie, Mike, Deborah and I leave the ditch to continue our walk down the lane, after a full retelling of my tragic tale, that is. 

We begin talking instead about how mind-boggling it is that only five days ago, America elected a misogynistic, narcissistic (among other things) man-baby to be its President, while doing our best to wrap our heads around why. We finally settle on the outcome of the election being fostered by fierce amounts of fear; fear of Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, women, gays, and taxes.

We also decide that nothing is going to trump our birthday weekend, so Julie and I begin reminiscing and sharing with Mike and Deborah about my surprise 40th birthday party right here in Wimberley, when Mom, Grandma, Julie, my cousin Kelly and four of my aunts drove to Central Texas and we all stayed together in my two-bedroom house in the Cypress-laden Wimberley woods.   

I point to the grove of trees that I pooped in every morning on that long birthday weekend. There were too damn many women using only two toilets, so I silently took one for the team by digging a hole in the ground and leaving a daily offering for Mother Nature. I just pretended I was camping.  

Don't even get me started about the fact that two of the eight of us sharing only two toilets were on our periods. I think Aunt Jeanne probably still suffers nightmares from the morning she witnessed the multi-contents of one of the toilets overflowing.  

I'll certainly never forget her scream.