Here's the Thing About My Birthday

I love my birthdate. Too bad the government took it away.

Hi everybody, it’s September, my birthday month, which, I guess, is only a big deal to me anymore. There have been so many of them! People are getting tired of wishing me a Happy Birthday year after year after year… This will be number 83 and I hate to tell them but I plan to keep on doing this. Year after year after year.

I was born on September 17, 1937, exactly 150 years after the signing of the Constitution of the United States. (It wasn’t ratified until 1781 and Washington wasn’t inaugurated until 1789, but who cares? None of it would have happened if those guys hadn’t signed that document on September 17, 1787. Constitution Day.)

But besides that auspicious day, there’s a kind of alliteration to my birthdate that always made me love to say it out loud—September seventeenth nineteen thirty seven. I love that. So how is it that my drivers license now says 9/18? It’s a sad story and almost all my fault.

It started out with that long-ago clerk who made a typo on my birth certificate and recorded the date as the 18th instead of the 17th, but it was my own damn big mouth that changed everything.

Everything was going along fine until about 25 years ago, when I was renewing my drivers license at the SOS office and I was chit-chatting with the clerk and just happened to mention, laughing, that that’s not what it says on my birth certificate. (What was WRONG with me??) She stopped everything.

“What?”

I tried to explain that in that tiny burg up in the nether-reaches of the Keweenaw north woods, where my birth was recorded, they made a lot of mistakes. Luckily, I didn’t tell her the REST of the story—that both my first and middle names were wrong, too.

My birth certificate says “Romana Gratia” when it should say “Ramona Gracia”. I’m serious. For 83 years my birth certificate has looked like it belonged to someone else and none of us who could have fixed it ever did. Through those years I got a Social Security card, a marriage license, a drivers license—everything—with a birth certificate that was all wrong! And now there’s no one left who can prove I am who I say I am and I was born on the day I celebrate my birthday.

I’ve never had a passport but I wonder if I could even get one? Would I have to live as Romana Gratia for the rest of my life if I tried?

(About that picture: That’s me in the middle, flanked by my cousins Sandra and Nedra. We’re all still here, still causing ‘good trouble’, I’m happy to say.)

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But on to other things: The house roof is finished! (Remember me talking about it in the last newsletter?) It was slow going, what with an unprecedented amount of rain for this time of year, but this part of the job is finished! It looks good, and none too soon. It was as if the roof suddenly woke up and realized how damaged it was and just decided to give up, because before they could get to the part over our bedroom it rained again and now there are brown stains on the ceiling that weren’t there before. So now we’ll need to paint. Of course.

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It’s hard to believe it’s been 19 years since the hijacked airliners plowed into the Twin Towers and unleashed the horrors that still seem unbelievable. The shock is still palpable, the pain still raw, the date, September 11, 2001, still etched into our memories.

Most years I mark it with a repeat of a piece I wrote several years ago, but I didn’t do it this year. This is the link to last year’s story. But as I was looking for it, I came across this piece I wrote in 2009 about a children’s coloring book called “A Scary Thing Happened”. If the thought was a good one, I felt the solution was thoroughly wrong-headed. See what you think.

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I’ve done a bit of new writing throughout it all, but I’ll save it for the next newsletter. Some pieces are still out but I’ve had some good news, too. But it can wait. Until next time…