Oh, sure, your friends and family try to make a big fuss over the milestones like fifty and sixty. There are plenty of “over-the-hill” jokes and snide references to the state of your sex life, but for the rest of them, the reality is that people are busy, wives have important jobs and kids aren't kids anymore, but adults with real jobs and lives of their own, and so a grownup’s birthday can come and go in an anticlimactic blur of one or two cards and some chocolate cake. Presents become an issue as well, the further you sink into middle-aged material comfort. I suppose this says something profound about the ultimate inadequacy of a materialist lifestyle; however, I think it has even more to do with how we perceive the world as adults as opposed to our view of it as children. Adults are a tough audience. Our lives are in many ways (sad a commentary as this is) defined by the stuff we accumulate, and after a while simply getting more “stuff”, no matter how “special” or expensive it is, just doesn’t do anything for us any more. It gets to be a lot like the arms race; all about bigger, better, faster, but not always truly wanted or needed. When you’re a kid, though, it seems that there’s little or no effort required in taking one ordinary day out of three hundred sixty-five other ordinary days and transforming it into something wonderful.
All of which leads me, by an admittedly circuitous route, to one birthday in particular: May 12, 1964, the day I turned eleven and the year of the opening of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. In late April of that year (it may well have been the week the Fair opened, in fact) I had my first taste of the Fair in the company of my fellow Cub Scouts (Pack 43, Den 1, Saint Aedan’s Parish, Jersey City) on a chilled, windy Sunday morning. We stopped first at the Vatican Pavilion to fulfill our Sunday Mass obligation, where I eagerly volunteered to serve as an Altar Boy (I was that kind of kid; always with the hand up in class. I’m surprised I wasn’t murdered by my peers at an early age). Not for the Pope, I hasten to point out; just for some poor parish priest from Long Island somewhere whose turn it was to say Mass there that day. It was still pretty cool, though.
We emerged an hour or so later, after Mass and a quick trip on a moving walkway past Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, beautifully lit and housed behind three inches of bulletproof glass. By now it was eleven AM or so, and the Fairgrounds were packed. I mean jammed. I mean waiting-for-an-hour-and-a-half-just-to-take-the-five-minute-ride-in-the-Johnson’s-Wax-Pavilion crowded. Most of our time was spent slowly threading our way through the crowds, like trying to wade upstream in a river of overcooked Cream of Wheat. We slogged on from exhibit to exhibit, looking for a line where the wait was only ten minutes less than forever. Grateful as I was just to be there, the day somehow lacked that certain sense of carefree fun I’d always assumed outings of this nature were supposed to have. So, jammed cheek-by-jowl with the rest of humanity who had come to gawk at corporate America’s vision of the clean, well-lit, and brightly waxed (but, surprisingly enough, fairly computer-free: who knew?) world of the future, I was pushed along by the rising tide of bodies until I found myself at the entrance gate again. We had gone into five pavilions (none of the interesting ones, mind you) and ridden on one ride. So much for my day at the Fair.
The next day I was back in class, up to my eyeballs in fifth-grade math, geography and science. A return trip to the Fair simply wasn’t on my radar. However, my mother, whom I never would have pegged as the adventurous type, began to concoct an elaborate scheme for a revisit almost immediately after that first ill-fated trip. She arranged to get a day off from work and then cleared her plans with the Sisters of St. Dominic who were my teachers. When I awoke the morning of my eleventh birthday, I assumed I’d be walking the six blocks to school as usual. Instead, to my utter surprise and endless delight, we ate a hurried breakfast, caught a bus to the waterfront in Jersey City, and boarded the special World’s Fair Ferry which shuttled passengers from a wharf near the Colgate factory (home of what was, at the time, the largest clock in the world) across the mouth of the Hudson River, then up the East River, to Queens, and docked right at the fairgrounds.
When we got there, it was as if we had been given the keys to Palisades Amusement Park after the place closed. Objectively, there had to be several thousand people at the Fair that day, but you hardly noticed them. Everything I wanted to see, every ride I wanted to ride, every hands-on exhibit that had been twelve or twenty or fifty people deep the Sunday of my first visit, was empty. No waiting. We ambled from building to building, going through the exhibit or on the ride twice and even three times, just because we could. I’ve had a lot of time to think, in the intervening years, about why this particular day is so special to me. I have always said to my family that it was without a doubt the best day of my life. Even the great milestones like graduation, marriage and the births of children don’t compare, since each one of those events were Important, with plenty of time to plan and therefore plenty of time to worry and fret over them. I suppose if someone had just whisked me to the church one day on a whim, where there was a full blown wedding ready to happen, it would have been a lot more, well, fun than it was. This day at the Fair was special for a lot of reasons: it was totally unexpected, and so out of character for my mother to have done such a thing as taken me out of school just so we could enjoy ourselves for a day. I realize now that it certainly must have been quite a sacrifice for her; my father had died two years earlier and money was tight. The total for the day, including transportation, passes to the fair and lunch, had to have equaled the day’s wage she was missing, probably more. More than anything though, was the sheer serendipity of it all. It was my birthday and every one of my friends were in class, but here I was at the World’s Fair! And best of all, it was as if my mother and I had the place all to ourselves.
At that moment, on that day, in that place which promised a glimpse into the “World of Tomorrow” (just as its predecessor had done in 1939), I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of being so totally immersed in being eleven years old, with all that implies; while at the same time seeing clearly (or so I thought at the time) how wonderful my adult life was going to be, shiny and filled with promise. I thought the AT&T Videophone was the coolest thing imaginable. I was fascinated by an almost room-sized contraption full of whirring tape reels and blinking lights that the folks at the IBM exhibit called an electronic computer, a fascinating gizmo that would have interesting (but limited) uses in science. I wanted so badly to drive one of those magnetically-controlled cars through GM’s City of Tomorrow, which, I still claim after all these years, was the neatest ride there. Because at the time I still believed I would grow up to become an astronomer, I easily pictured myself living in one of those domed colonies on the Moon or Mars. Everything I saw that day was a quick glance into one small bit of the infinite variety of futures I could imagine for myself.
But this day, this amazing day, this day unlike any other for the sheer surprise and wonder of it all, came to an end. We rode back to Jersey City on the ferry and the bus, and the next morning my mother went back to cooking lunch for three hundred hungry high school boys while I returned to my fifth grade classroom, full of stories to tell and with the hope of being the envy of all my classmates, if only for a few hours. The next day passed, and the next, and before I knew it I was graduating high school and then college; there was marriage and children (and the death of a child); and my mother had long gone to be reunited with my father, the man she loved and had missed so much. Other birthdays came and went, but it was never the same.
All this time later, I readily confess that I still harbor a full-blown disappointment that despite what I saw that day the “world of tomorrow”, my here and now, has no colonies on the moon and Mars, no atomic engines the size of typewriter cases, and even the videophone has had tough sledding. This shouldn’t be surprising though, since the one bit of wisdom (or insight) I’ve gained in my middle age is the knowledge that the future is something that sneaks up on you out of left field somewhere. Humankind’s vision wasn’t far-reaching enough, in 1964, to hold things like the Internet, and personal computers, and five dollar wrist watches with more power on one little chip inside them than in all the computers in all the Apollo space capsules. My own vision at eleven wasn’t broad enough to encompass all the day-to-day miracles I encounter now: a loving wife, a beautiful child on the brink of her own wondrous adventures in life, good neighbors, good friends.
But the fact remains, plain and simple, that when Spring is in the air and my birthday comes rolling around yet again, something is missing. While I wouldn’t trade my life or my family for anything, the part of me that is still eleven (that will always be eleven, no matter how old the face in the mirror grows) is waiting for something. I’m not exactly sure what it is that I expect, or hope for. Maybe I’m just hoping that this birthday will be it – that special, wonderful, day when I will feel eleven again and each moment is full of wide-eyed anticipation of what’s around the corner or in the next pavilion at the Fair. Or perhaps I’m simply waiting for one, just one, of those astonishing marvels of the future I saw spread across Flushing Meadows all those years ago to come true. Whatever it might be, the one thing I’m certain of is that it is this anticipation and hope that keeps me young; it is what reminds me that my life’s journey is far from over. It is what keeps me going, every day. Oh, and one more thing – thank you, Mama. I love you.
"Mama D." ca. 1964
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