Musings From the Nearer Side of Twenty-One

I had been talking about my twenty-first birthday for months. Each twenty-eighth day from July to October was a chalk mark in my cell of illegality. Fumbling with IDs which couldn't possibly be mine; hastily memorizing "I live on Cedar Lane, am 5'11," and August 6, 1975 makes me twenty three" and explaining to bouncers that the airport in Toronto had lost my luggage and "of course my passport, too...doesn't that suck?" would be a thing of the past. I would be allowed to drink as myself. I could wear what I wanted to bars. I could chat with bartenders. I could stop being a burden on my legal friends and those who were better misidentified than I was. In some small way I would be free.

October 28, like January 1, December 25 (I am Jewish, but that just makes it worse) and December 26 (Canadian Boxing Day), had always been an anticlimactic experience. But because this birthday would be less a fleeting blur of metallic balloons and singing cards than a crossing over into the world of the initiated, there would be no disappointment. The "day" was not the important part of this year's commemoration of my aging; 21 was the gift that would keep on giving.

There was no let-down. I was as cheerful and self-satisfied as George Steinbrenner at his ticker-tape parade, chirping to anyone who would listen that it was my twenty-first. But I was wrong in believing that the day of my birthday wasn't the important part. I had falsely prophesied the source of a birthday's specialness. That specialness is born of the specificity of time, from an understanding that time is not like water, fluid throughout and a means of carrying me with its current from here to there. Time can be a destination-or set of destinations-and it can carry different weights at each of them.

It was important that I be at a bar at exactly midnight, when my ID both expired and made me legal. It was important for the same reason that watching the World Series as it happens--and not on video the next day--is important. These are livings that lose something in time lag. It is not that they lose their suspense or mystery. And it is not that the anticipation of their retelling many years from now demands an anecdotal "what I was doing as I turned 21." These times are special because they are urgent. They confound the order of life by acting like petulant children. They demand to be entertained right at this moment and I indulge them because I know that if I don't, I will not deserve the wish I make when I catch the clock turning 10:28 p.m.

What is unique about this sort of urgency is that it is completely self-imposed. It has nothing to do with the panicky demand of printing out a paper at 4:56 p.m. and getting it to the Quad by 5 p.m. Instead it is an internal urgency which asks me to remember myself and to be vigilant in those remembrances. The rituals of birthdays are blissfully self-centered and rightfully so. It is charming to me and only me to smile as I remember the date. It is amusing only to me to file away the fact that Julia Roberts shares a fondness for October 28. Julia and I, wherever she is, are smiling, but it's only my knowledge that she is which counts.

Of course, this urgency is arbitrary. I could have been "induced" on the twenty-seventh, or held onto until the twenty-ninth. But I wasn't. And the arbitrariness of pains, labor and birth 21 years ago have made 28 my lucky number, orange (from the imminent Halloween) my favorite color and October somehow a poignant month. Arbitrariness and coincidence take on meaning and inform the temporal map through which I navigate my life. Twenty-eight is one signpost, autumn another and the paragraph on Scorpio in Cosmo's horoscope a third. That's why I have a responsibility to reconfirm this arbitrary meaning for myself each year by celebrating on my birthday no matter what reading, what thesis, or what application is waiting for me.

So I did all the requisite 21-rituals in a timely fashion. I scurried to Grafton and ordered a margarita (how festive!). I visited the Pro and asked for my special birthday discount (10 percent) to replenish the emergency reserves formerly built up by my older roommates. I went out to dinner and decadently ordered enough courses to make Nero blanch. I lingered in Grendel's downstairs and I didn't care that I woke up warm and peaceful the next day well into my section taking place far away in the Barker Center. I was new and older. The boundaries marking my passage are random and dismissable, but I'd rather not dismiss them. Instead I'll revel in those things which make a collection of minutes and hours my own.

Rachel A. Farbiarz is a senior Social Studies concentrator in Leverett House. At this time next year she will be living with a bullfighter and studying flamenco.