60 Is the New Something

So, I turned 60 this past week. It was not a particularly momentous day, as the family had thrown me a party on the Saturday before, and it was wonderful. But on my actual birthday, which was Tuesday, I was once again in a high school classroom. At least this time I wasn’t presenting and the students pretty much ignored me, so that was nice. And then Ken took me out to a fancy restaurant for a steak dinner, and came back home to the most incredible caramel cheesecake with toffee sauce, made by Kate’s lovely boyfriend Max, and it was the best cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. 60 years old isn’t bad, I guess–I can’t do a cartwheel anymore but I get discounts at the thrift store now. The hair on my head no longer grows as fast as the hair on my lip…but on the positive side, the hair on my legs hardly grows at all. So as my dad would say, “What you lose on the roundabout, you save on the swings.” He’s Scottish, so he has a lot of weird sayings, but no one knows what they mean. At any rate, it was all very nice, and I was thinking about other birthdays and found this throwback to 2014–my first birthday post about the best card I’ve ever gotten. So here it is, just for you:

Specific types of birthday cards are a tradition in my family. My parents always buy me cards with beautiful messages on them, and I always appreciate the sentiments, because they are from the heart, and I love my parents tremendously. My aunts, on the other hand, endeavour to find the funniest cards possible, which are also from the heart, albeit another area of the heart, and I also love them tremendously. This past weekend, my family threw me an early birthday party, and one of my aunts gave me the BEST birthday card ever.

I share it with you now, so that you can copy and paste it into any card you want (don’t tell the copyright police). I opened it up and this is what it said:

• Okay, I’m not sure this will work, but let’s try it.
• Act like you’re reading something personal that I wrote in your card.
• After a couple of seconds, laugh as though I wrote something very funny. In fact, tilt your head back when you laugh so it looks extremely funny.
• Now nod your head as though I wrote something very serious and heartfelt. Maybe touch your heart and exhale, but don’t make it look forced.
• Okay, now close the card, look at me with sincere gratitude, and mouth the words “thank you”.

So I followed the directions, and you wouldn’t believe the reaction. Everyone was like “What?!! What did it say?!!” Then I passed it around the room and other people followed the directions too (an Oscar to my brother, who has a PhD and it’s not even for acting!), until everyone who hadn’t read it was freaking out. Try it for yourself—it’s better than “pin the tail on the donkey”, that’s for sure.

The other tradition with cards that we’ve developed as a family is to give someone a card that has nothing to do with the occasion, but to doctor it up to fit. This year, Kate gave me the best one that any member of the family has ever done, and I laughed my head off when I read it (and just for the record, Waiting For Godot is a fantastic play, KATE):

She definitely inherited my sense of humour. Anyway, it’s been a great birthday week–last night, Ken invited our friends and neighbours for cake and snacks and it was the best night. I feel like a very lucky old woman.

27 thoughts on “60 Is the New Something”

  3. Happy birthday! Those cards are brilliant 🙂

    The whole “swings and roundabouts” thing is quite a British saying and everyone here knows the meaning if someone says to you “it’s a case of swings & roundabouts”. This basically comes from the idea of a finite amount of time playing in the park. You can play on anything you want but “what you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts”. It’s a choice you have to make but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter to anyone else; it’s a personal preference where you win some and you lose some.

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  4. I had a friend who gave the most inappropriate cards imaginable. On the death of my grandmother he gave me a Mickey Mouse “You’re Two Years Old!” card but wrote a very nice and thoughtful message in it. It was a laugh I needed. Also what two-year old cares about a card? Needless to say I like the cut of your aunt’s and daughter’s jibs.
    And most importantly happy birthday! Every milestone is momentous and every year is a milestone.

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  8. Welcome to Club 60, my friend. I’ve been wandering down this new road for almost a year now (I’ll turn 61 in January). Everything is basically the same, it just takes you a few minutes to longer to figure out where you car keys might be…

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