Saturday, September 17, 2011

A Little Gift for a Big Birthday

I celebrated my birthday on the 15th of this month.

"I am now entitled to sing a certain Beatles' song," I wrote to my son on the chat.

"Which one? When I´m Sixty-Four?," asked my son.

l laughed, "No, actually I mean 'Yesterday'," I retorted.

I have always celebrated my birthday, happy with the knowledge that I have lived another year, rather than, as a friend of mine insists, that each birthday brings us one year closer to the end of our lives. I used to celebrate my birthdays by inviting 25 or 30 of my closest friends and having a bash of eating and drinking until five or six o'clock in the morning. Now I am more sensible; so, in view of that astonishing fact, I said to my wife:

"For my birthday meal, I would like to go to that place we passed by, the other day when we went for a walk, and have a hamburger and a pint of beer."

"That's a great idea," agreed my wife (for once).

The place I was referring to, we found out, is called "Le Surfing" appropriately enough because it is on the part of the Biarritz coast that we call "La Côte Basque", and where lots of surfers come to ride the waves that are a bit longer and larger than on any other of the many beaches of this area.

The restaurant is a long, rectangular room with one side open to the beach. It is especially nice in the late afternoon when you get sunsets like this:

When the waiter came, we ordered some Serrano ham and goat cheese to nibble on with our aperitif; and as we ate and chatted, my mind went back to the birthday presents my wife had given me. One was a black T-shirt of very good quality. She likes me to wear black things; she says they make me look more elegant and handsome. When I wear black, I feel as if I were going to a marriage or a funeral, which to some people amounts to the same thing.

The second gift she gave me was a little book. I don't mean "little" in the sense of an endearing adjective, I mean the book is VERY little: 7 by 8.5 centimeters. The title is "The Quotable Oscar Wilde" and it contains, of course, quotes by that well-known, bon-vivant, author, homosexual rogue, and satirist. As I read through the many notable quotes in the petite volume, I was struck by the fact that for someone who reportedly only had a relationship with women in order to keep up appearances (and miserably failing to do so), he was pretty perceptive of their strengths and foibles. Among some of his most memorable sayings about women are:

"All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy; no man does, that is his."

"Women are meant to be loved, not understood."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past."

As I read through these and other of his quotes, I marveled not only at how sharp most of them were, but at how well they still applied to "the human condition", especially the female variety of humanity. Wilde says, for example, "Women can discover everything except the obvious." I have always said that if I wanted to hide anything from my wife, I would place it in plain sight. Whenever I see her running around the house looking for her mobile phone, her glasses, a pen, or any other article, I am sure to find it in front of where she had been sitting--or in that bag of her's that I call "the black hole".

Another of my favorite quotes is, "Women give to men the very gold of their lives; but, they always want it back in small change." I laughed when I read this, not only because of its obvious hilarity but also because I have always recognized that trait in the women I have know--and I mean that to be not only friends and girlfriends I had in my youth but also women closer to me such as my mother, my sister, and surely my present wife. For example, she is generous to a fault and will not hesitate to get me an expensive gift or to make the grand gesture that makes me happy; but, little by little, she gets payback: "A gentleman never pours wine for himself first if there is a lady present," she will say if I partake of wine at lunch without first filling her glass. Or she will point out that she would like to be asked if she wants a spot of something when I am serving myself my afternoon aperitif. She has also said that "A little tenderness is never amiss at the end of the day or when one wakes in the morning." Little by little, the small change tinkled into their cash box!

More importantly, Wilde's adage that "The world was made for men,not for women" seems to be proven everyday by my wife and women friends of ours: they seem baffled by simple mechanical things, stumped by the works of most electronic apparatus, absolutely mystified by the instruction booklets that explain how to assemble any kind of article from a bicycle to a skateboard. Therefore, in our case, I have to come to my wife's rescue and take over when tears of frustration start to well in her eyes as she tries to put together the charming little bookshelf she bought at the do-it-yourself store. She then goes off to have a cup of tea and I interrupt whatever I am doing in order to finish the job. I sometimes wonder if this is not the way women have of getting us to feel (falsely) superior and thus trick us into doing all of these menial jobs.

My musings were interrupted by the waiter who brought our order: I had a hamburger that was very good but a challenge to finish and my wife had a "parmentier de confit de canard" which is a marvelous French dish consisting of strands of duck meat covered in mashed potatoes. As we ate and conversed, again my mind wandered back to my little book: in the section where Oscar Wilde talks about women, he also has this to say about men:

"I sometimes think that God, in creating man, rather overestimated his ability." But, he should have added, and underestimated the wiles he had given women.

But, Wilde, like all men, was not infallible. I think he got it wrong when he said, "In married life, three is company, two is none." Because that night, on my birthday, with the sea air coming through the open windows of the restaurant, and the rush of the waves softly murmuring in the background, we two were definitely very good company.

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