The Anniversary
Last month, Susan celebrated her 95th birthday. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were there along with the grand-nephews, step-cousins, half-grand-nieces and other assorted vaguely defined relatives. The festivities included dinners, a picnic, and everyone went to Sue’s church on Sunday (much to the delight of the priest, who suddenly saw his congregation swell by half again that day). A good time was had by all.
Then everyone went home.
Next week, Sue and I are going to celebrate another anniversary. It will be the 81st anniversary of the weekend that she and her best friend Mary flew from the Monterey Peninsula to San Francisco. Mary was the pilot whom flew in a Spad biplane that night. Mary was 16 years old – the youngest licensed female pilot in California, if not the United States – and Sue was 14.
On the 80th anniversary when Sue first told me the story she said Mary had stopped by her house one afternoon and said, “I’m going to San Francisco tonight. Flying up there. Do you want to go?” Sue said that she remembers blinking twice, slowly, and then saying, “Su-u-u-re, you bet, sister!” Well, it was 1931.
Mary owned her own plane, a military surplus (First World War, remember) aircraft that her father had bought for her. Sue left a vague note and off they went. They wore leather helmets with goggles in the open-cockpit plane and leather jackets to protect themselves from the cold foggy air.
Who was Mary going to visit? Where did they stay and what did they do? Sue doesn’t remember or even care. She vaguely recalls having dinner on Fisherman’s Warf, but it’s the airplane ride that sticks in her mind. Birthdays? They’re for the family. Whatever the occasion, Sue says that night she will never forget.
Birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Christmas, Labor Day weekends – they’re all important, of course, and certainly worth celebrating with family and friends. Yet, there are other anniversaries that spark memories, if only we remember and share them. Some of them are kept to ourselves – I remember a woman who used to always buy herself a bunch of Shasta daisies on September 2nd. It had something to do with a camping trip she took with friends when she was a young woman, but she never shared the story, she just smiled and pressed the flowers to her face.
It’s important to celebrate those special days most memorable to us. The little old lady down the street has a warehouse of anniversaries, some delightful and some not so kind: The 72nd anniversary of the first day she voted (“Fat lot of good that did, I’ll tell you!”), 68 years since she was widowed (“That awful, awful telegram…”), or the day she sold her car, never to drive again. All are worth marking, all are worth remembering. Inspiration comes every day.
History, someone once wrote, is a way to keep everything from happening all at once. The trick is to tease out the individual threads, listen to the stories and become inspired by them.
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