Once Upon a Time…

by Arnold De Villa
February 16, 2012
…and they live happily ever after”, the common ending of fairy tale beginnings, wordswe used to hear as kids. They come as sedatives from moms who tucked us in bed. They sing the songs of movies for kids. And they mark the mythical beginning of hopeful stories soaked with optimistic sighs.
Titles are not the normal openings of a paragraph. A grammatical sentence should start with an upper case. And if I do not begin with a theme in the next three seconds, I am sure that no one will hang around.
A week ago, I celebrated a benchmark birthday; five decades of memories safely archived in the wrinkled neurons of my brain. For the past four hundred and thirty-eight thousand hours, I have inhaled and exhaled air more than five hundred and twenty-five million times. My heart pulsated at least a billion and a half ticks. And I probably consumed more than one hundred and forty-six thousand glasses of water. As a hiatus to my day, I paid a short visit to “Facebook”, something I have not done for quite some time. There might be some greetings from a bunch of very close friends, I thought, but I ended up thanking more than a hundred well-wishers of a very diversified crowd: classmatesfrom grade school through college, old flings and girlfriends, acquaintances from the different roles I had in my past life, greetings in assorted languages from various ethnic groups, from “friends” I will probably never meet in life, and from family members whom I have not seen for years. While I was in the middle of responding to each and every one of them, someone posted, “Why do we celebrate birthdays?” Huh! I was caught off guard. Since I was just starting to enjoy the thoughtfulness of people, this presumably cynical question blotted my eyes. Who in the world would ask such a thing? Why?
There are certain religious cults that despise any form of celebration, birthdays included. If they truly believe that their faith is incompatible with the human joys of birthday parties, then that is their prerogative. I will leave them alone. The question still demands an answer. Why are birthdays celebrated?
So once upon a time, there was a lad. He was still a stranger to the lovely lass he never knew. The lass had other things in mind. The lad had somewhere else to go. Their paths seemed distant, their roads unknown. One day, their fate met with their mazes and their gazes fused as one. In the midst of so many faces, they saw each other. And within the sea of so many sights, they stared at a common vision. So now the strangers were no longer strangers. The lad’s heart beat with hers and hers responded with his. Their vision grew.
In the beginning was the glance, and the glance became a touch. And the touch became flesh. That was the tale of the single cell with a head and a tailwho fought and struggled against so many peers. He battled hard against the elements. He needed to merge with one big egg, an egg waiting at the right time, the only time it had. One moment, one chance, one big egg with one single cell: all immersed in a chaotic sea of acids, antigens and antibodies. The fight was tough, the battle was brutal. Then, in a split second magic of enchanted collision, fusion took over and a new flesh took place. And this is why I think we celebrate birthdays…
They are like sentences that do not start with an upper case but from a Title with bold prints. Of all the so many possibilities, the myriad armies of wiggling tails, the adverse acidity of the opposing camp, only one and one alone will make it. And if that sole survivor makes it to the light, sees the world and lives, then that is a reason for celebration. That is why birthdays are recalled. When that survival grows into a persistent mode of existence and that existence becomes the reason for which its presence delivers the persistency of others, then more celebration is in order. The birthday of one becomes the birthday of another and the birthday of the other becomes the birthday of all.
It is not the cake or the candles on top of it. It is not the gifts and the kisses from friends. It is not the lovely card from Hallmark, or the fresh bouquet of roses. It is not the box of candies or the warm hug. It is the day, that one and only day, the single second on that day, the nanosecond of a second when human microbes crossed the maze from the paths of a lad and alass. And it was no one else that grew except you.That is more than a reason for a birthday celebration.
For those of us at the golden mark of a century, birthdays seem cumbersome. Perhaps the person who asked why we celebrate birthdays has more years in his belt than I do. Indeed, the more years we leave behind, the fewer years we see forthcoming. The fewer years we see forthcoming, the more years we would like to remember that we can’t. Cynicism is understandable though not acceptable. Life is a paradox that taunts and teases us every time we seek for reasons that will never be there. But when we learn to accept and enjoy, life becomes a rewarding act of blissful appreciation. Our age becomes a source of wisdom when it was once a mere yearning to know.
We do celebrate birthdays not because of the party, but it is because of a party that birthdays are remembered. It always takes more than one soul for birthdays to conceive. It takes more than one conception for birthday celebrations. It takes at least three lives for a birthday to take place. Behind the birthday scene is a valentine’s treat. That brings us to what we have this week. Why do we celebrate birthdays? Is it because behind it is a Valentine’s Day? Then why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day?