Steve’s 60th was months in the making: his family and I took about 50 text messages to find a weekend that everyone was able to travel up and surprise him; and they were also involved in sending me photos so I could put a photo book together that would cover the whole period, and include all of the significant people in his life so far.
I put the photo book together while on leave from work, doing it in snatches from our bedroom, the study or the lounge room and making the most of when he was away gliding during the odd weekend. My friend Stacey helped out by taking some clandestine photos of Steve and her partner Max playing squash, and I completed the story by popping in a photo of an old friend of his from the internet rather than tracking him down and asking for something more personal from their past.
We had arranged for Rhea to go to Mum and Dad’s after school on the Friday night before Steve’s Sunday birthday, aiming to leverage some delaying tactics. In fact the three or four visits to the shops that he made were all legitimate, in response to needing items for that night’s dinner (the last time he rang me: ‘Are you sure you don’t need anything else for dinner, cause’ this is the fourth time I’ve been to the shops in the last hour’). Mum and Dad didn’t give anything away, and despite their plane being delayed, we managed to have Steve’s sisters and the partner who is in Australia and his mum all arrive while Steve and Rhea were out, so they had time to ready themselves to shock him with their presence. They stopped off at the shops to get some champagne and present decorations to wear and would have missed him by five or ten minutes.
We had a jolly dinner at home that night (I had been cooking while Steve was running around at the shops), complete with a strawberry cheesecake that Lara made for him. The next day during the wind event that swept down the east coast, we all set off to watch Rhea’s last netball game of the season. As a bonus, we saw Steve’s family friends who also have daughters playing netball there, and then the adults dashed off the Gallery to see the Gaughin exhibition – very satisfying – before readying ourselves for the birthday dinner at a very high end restaurant that happens to be around the corner from us. Its small dishes included fish and chips whereby the fish were fish-flavoured chips and the potato was a dip. It was the sort of place where you savour every mouthful.
On Steve’s birthday proper, we gave him his photo album in bed so he had a chance to flick through it and then met the family for brunch at their hotel. The family then gave him the rest of his presents back at home, including a cheese board that Lara made at school and some Pilates classes, afterwards most kindly spending the next few hours pulling weeds out of our garden with us, fast-tracking the work we have been doing to create a garden from some weedy expanses of our quarter acre block.
Maggie and then Mum and Dad dropped over with birthday wishes after his family had departed, money for a generous birthday dinner from Maggie, and we ate some of the cake Lara had made. And then a week later, we had another birthday adventure when Steve’s aunts arrived on Friday night, this time directly to the door while we were all home. Lara had made the cake again, and it was humming with strawberries just like the first weekend.
We had a celebratory lunch the next day at a winery – tasty and down to earth food with a dessert of crème brulée for Steve, and I had a peach mousse. His aunts were treated to all of the photo books and one of his aunts identified an unknown man in one of the old photos – a friend of hers from her early adulthood. The weather was less blustery, but nevertheless we sat inside when they dropped over prior to leaving the next day.
In summary, we celebrated Steve’s birthday over a week, and it was a week of connection, reminiscences, good food and joy. In the words of his mum in her card to him, ‘To my beautiful 60 year old son, I can’t believe that it is 60 years since Nigel and I had the excitement and huge pleasure of your birth. Happy happy birthday my love, and enjoy the ones to come.’ The card itself had a drawing of a duck driving an old yellow sports care and it said ‘I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol’. The card from his aunts said:
Happy Birthday
60
(How the f*ck did that happen?)
How lucky we have all been to share some of these 60 years with Steve. He is kind, patient, resilient, hard working, smart, funny, and cheerful.
What a find he has been. I think I will keep him.
