July 9 is the big day around here, for some mystical numerological reason that hasn't been adequately explained to me yet by any tarot or star-chart-reading acquaintances. July 9 is the birthday of my own dearest daughter, who turns 17 today; as I write this, she is upstairs in her bed having woken early on a Tuesday to excitedly birthday-scroll TikTok videos of golden retriever puppies in hopes a golden retriever puppy might be among her birthday presents. (Spoiler: A puppy is not!) July 9 is also the birthday of my best friend, my dear departed father, and my late maternal grandfather in Heaven. Whenever I mention this numerological, astrological alignment in conversations about coincidences, I feel listeners should be astonished, but listeners are never as astonished as I want them to be. Is this coincidence not astonishing? Daughter, father, grandfather, best friend?
Does it mean anything that July 9 is also the birthday of Tom Hanks? No?
(Tom Hanks, by the way, is my personal nominee in the Spin a Wheel and Find an Electable Democrat sweepstakes this month. Winners get a six-foot stuffed panda bear and the survival of the great American experiment in democracy. Whee! Step right up!)
Does it mean anything, coincidence-wise, that July 9 is also the date the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, granting civil rights and "equal protection of the laws" to all Americans, including the formerly enslaved? No?
Hm.
My daughter, the birthday girl, watched an Amazon Prime documentary on simulation theory last week and ever since has been exclaiming boisterously, whenever there's any sort of even minor coincidence, that it is evidence we're all living in the Matrix. While I, too, have read Nick Bostrom's "simulation hypothesis" and agree it's statistically likely we're living in one of the infinite manufactured worlds rather than the lone, original, organic-source world, I am not at all convinced that simulation glitches are why her ex-boyfriend texted her exactly one second after she was peeping at an old video clip of him on Snapchat, or why the number 44 kept popping up all school year, everywhere, and it was always 44 minutes past the hour when she looked at a clock. If you look for 44s and ex-boyfriends, you will find them, dear.
We start a birthday morning around here by unwrapping presents at the breakfast table on the sun porch. The birthday girl or boy reads a sentimental birthday card from me, in which I enumerate all their talents and charms and congratulate them on their good sense and the year's achievements, and then they unwrap. My daughter wanted a Ford Bronco for her 17th birthday, but there were two (actual) glitches with that birthday wish: one, she doesn't have a driver's license, and, two, I don't have $48,000. She got some really cute pajamas and an expensive hairbrush, instead.
It's a bit ironic -- to employ that overused phrase -- that I was a prolific birthday-cake baker only back in the years when I lived alone and was childless. Once I became a parent, I hardly had the time for baking. The best birthday cake I ever created was a giant snowball cake out of the "Joy of Cooking" for my Aunt Mary in the late 1990s, a triple-layer vanilla monster shaped like a snowball and covered in coconut flakes. (What is it about snowballs and snowball-shape things that inspires such joy?) I remember carrying the snowball cake into the dining room atop a large silver salver, heavy as a medium-size golden retriever, to appreciative oohs and ahs. (Though perhaps slightly less astonished oohs and ahs than I had been anticipating. Maybe it's just my nature to be more astonished than the average person. Maybe that's my gift.) My orange chiffon with glossy ganache was fairly epic, back in the days of icing and vanilla beans, too. Still, the quintessentially American recipe of a double-layer "yellow cake with chocolate frosting" remains my favorite dessert of all desserts, the Platonic ideal and my best expression of love.
The family birthday barbecue for Nettie tomorrow evening will be a modest backyard affair. I'm marinating Huli Huli chicken from New York Times Cooking, making a kimchi slaw and bread-and-butter-pickle potato salad. And -- yes, I think I will -- perhaps I will turn the Vornado fan on full blast, set the oven to 350, and attempt an orange chiffon in the swampy, bayou heat of East Hampton in July as the world ends. (We're all feeling a bit like soggy-bottom chiffon in this heavy weather, are we not?) I'm not invited to the real celebration being thrown by Nettie's extended social network; that one is tonight, and I'm sure the girls will dress in their flowery summer dresses and pose for 44,000 pictures, and many tributes in her name will be posted online. The names of the birthday girls and boys are invoked on Snapchat and TikTok like the names of the saints.
The enumeration and proliferation of happy birthday wishes is the only decent purpose of social media, in my opinion. They've been flowing in all morning -- ding! ding! ding! ding! -- and Nettie has been showing me the clips, reel after reel of gorgeous 16 and 17-year-olds with long, flat hair. They laugh -- genuinely laughing, not fake laughing -- and gambol on the beach in hoodies and make bug-eyed faces as they turn to the camera with blue frosting all over their face, and twitch their rear ends in skimpy Roller Rabbit shortie pajamas for the lens for all eternity.
Because she is what is termed a "rising senior" this July, my 17-year-old in her flowery summer dress is smack-dab in the middle of what is termed "the college search" and, indeed, only yesterday dove into her first attempts to write an outline for the main essay prompt for what is termed "the Common App." She's officially applying. Her Common App essay is going to be on the extraordinary, mind-bending trajectory of her life so far, from an actual mud-floored actual hut in southern Ethiopia to her crazy current-day privileged existence surrounded by the teenage One Percent, all of whom appear to have been given Broncos or Jeep Wranglers for their most recent birthday by their parents.
Nettie has filled out so many inquiry forms on colleges' and universities' websites that several of these institutions know her birth date and have been emailing her birthday congratulations this morning, too: Holy Cross, Manhattanville, Clark. Just now, shortly after 9 a.m. on July 9, her iPhone rang and she answered. It was a recruiter asking if she would like to join the U.S. Army. Surprised and confused -- astonished -- she tried to hand the phone to me, but I was confused, also, and handed it back.
"No, thank you," she said to the recruiter. I congratulated my birthday girl again on her good sense and told her that, no, I agreed that perhaps 2024 wouldn't be a terrific moment for her to take an Oath of Enlistment committing her to four or five years of active service in the military. Unless Tom Hanks enters the race and saves us from authoritarian rule, that is. If Hanks jumps in, she might consider Navy R.O.T.C.? Nettie says there's an interesting naval science program for the Bulldog Battalion at Yale.