The older you get, the harder your birthdays get. I wish I could go back to the way it felt when I was a kid. The presents were great. Getting older was great. Now there isn’t much someone can give me for my birthday that I couldn’t get myself. I wish that presents were given on a relative scale of happiness. A box of legos used to get me so excited. It would probably take a car or a boat to get that kind of feeling out of me today, and nobody is buying me that.
Now, every year that goes ticking by reminds me of how much closer I am to not having any birthdays. Every time I say my age I feel simultaneously repulsed and acutely aware of my mortality. Memories are quickly becoming more important than anything with a monetary value, so my wife and I decided a few years ago to forgo presents in lieu of ‘experiences’.
For her, this is much easier to accomplish. Her birthday is in the winter and we can travel most anywhere relatively cheap to celebrate and create those precious memories. For me, my birthday is in late June. Everywhere in this country seems to be booked in June or out of my grasp. Actually, it seems everywhere in every country is booked in June. For my special day that leaves us stuck in the house because it’s too hot to make any memories outside. I’ll be honest, I’ve pretty much made every memory I could in this house but moving in a Georgia summer is another memory do not feel like making.
One summer activity that I can get behind is canoeing and a couple of years ago I decided to make a memory on the Chattahoochee River for my birthday. My wife had to work and I did not have a child yet so it was just me, myself, and I. We lived a few miles from a park on the north side of Atlanta that I knew rented canoes so I packed myself up a cooler, lubed up with enough sunscreen to put us into the next ice age, and set off.
I consider myself a strong canoer. I’m not against wearing a life jacket (just for show) but I usually wear regular shoes and socks if I am not planning on getting wet. If you’ve ever driven over the Chattahoochee and considered going canoeing you’d probably also not put getting wet as a priority or even a goal. I’m not saying it’s gross but I’m not saying you wouldn’t consider going to an urgent care center if you got the water in your mouth.
When I arrived at the canoe rental place it never occurred to me to call ahead and make sure they had canoes. They did, but they were not using them on the part of the river I wanted to go on. Even though it was my birthday there was nothing that could be done to get me a canoe. The only thing left for me was a kayak...and not the cool kind, the kind that is practically a plastic board with a groove to let you know where your hindquarters were supposed to go.
I wasn’t going to let the vessel rental ruin my day. I got in a big van with a trailer on the back carrying my kayak. A teenager drove me the few miles up the river to put me out. I sat in the very back row and didn’t say a word, just to make it awkward. I somewhat regret that. When I arrived the kid takes my kayak, put it at the bank of the river, tosses out a paddle and a life jacket, and leaves without saying a word. I still don’t know if he did that on purpose or not but I realized after he sped away, that I had no idea where or how far I was supposed to go and I didn’t have my phone.
I’d figure it out I thought and hoped on the plastic board and paddled off. I got a couple of hundred feet down the river and ran up on some rocks. I should mention that at the time I was a rather corpulent fellow. Obese some may say. When I freed myself from the rocks, I went another ten feet and ran up on the rocks again. Then again. Then again. After an hour I may have gone a quarter of a mile.
I was getting frustrated. It was hot. I was going nowhere and to top it off I could not just put the kayak over my head and hike it because I was wearing brand new shoes. Some may ask why I didn’t just take them off. Well, here’s the thing. I don’t like taking off my shoes. I was pretty much born with shoes on. The bottoms of my feet may be one of the softest and most fragile materials on earth, because other than carpet, they have not touched many other surfaces. I lack the calloused, hard, leather soles that most other humans develop over their life.
For the next five hours, I scooted. I scooted and scooted and scooted. I scooted three miles down the Chattahoochee during one of its lowest points in half a century. When I finally arrived, dehydrated and exhausted at the rental place there was the teenager standing at the end of a dock to welcome me with a grin. He helped me out. I asked this kid how come he didn’t tell me the river was so low? “You didn’t ask...” he replied.
You really can’t put a price on memories like that. Happy birthday to me.