I say it's my birthday

So Sunday night, I was watching Jane Eyre on Masterpiece Theatre, which I've already seen but it's brilliant and well worth a second viewing, and at one point Jane was tugging nervously at the lace cuffs of her dress, and I thought: "I have got to have a pair of Mrs. Beetons for my birthday." And then I thought, "Don't be silly." That was probably the best thing for me to think at the time, because it means I didn't try to do the very fiddly beaded-cast-on at 10:30 on a Sunday night.

But Monday morning, I decided it wasn't silly; why shouldn't I knit myself a birthday gift? I've been admiring the pattern for years, and I have appropriate yarn in the stash, and that does it - I shall have a pair of Mrs. Beetons for my birthday. Fortunately, the second one went much more smoothly than the first, and here they are!


I'm 36. It's a lovely number, divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, and 18 - you can't ask much more than that of a number. (My relationship with numbers is a bit weird.) It's a charmingly square number, as I wrote to Pinky the other night.

When I was a kid, I wasn't too crazy about having a birthday right after Christmas. People forget, you see. Christmas is always crazy and stressful, and people are so glad to have it over with, and then there's a party at the New Year, and the next day is generally just another day off, unless you're a football fan, which I'm not, and...what? Birthday? Oh yeah. Sometimes this was handled by sending me a gift in mid-December and declaring cheerfully that it was for Christmas AND my birthday. I was an intelligent child and couldn't help noticing that my brother, born safely in October, never got an ugly sweater for Christmas AND his birthday. I'll be honest - there were years when I took these slights to my birthday less than gracefully, and years when I actually was ungrateful enough to complain about being born right after Christmas. (Dear Mom and Dad: Sorry about that.)

Well, I'm done with that. Over the last few years, I've come to enjoy having my birthday right at the beginning of the year. All my annual dwelling on the year ahead comes at the same time. I always know how old I was in a given year - no calculations required, because I was that age for the entire year. "How old were you in 1987?" someone will ask, and without hesitation I can say, "Fifteen. Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" I share my birthday with a bunch of cool people, like Jack Hanna and Isaac Asimov and Cuba Gooding Jr. And Julius LaRosa.

Time for me and my Mrs. Beetons to go dwell on the year ahead, and later there will be dinner at my favorite restaurant, and cake, and my family singing "Happy Birthday" in their sweet off-key way. Because this is my birthday, and it's a good day!