The Birthiversary

This past weekend, we celebrated both my mother’s 65th birthday and my parents’ 65th wedding anniversary. How is something like this possible? Well, it’s really quite simple: we all went out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.

But I suppose what you might be hung up on are the numbers. No, neither one is a typo. And no, it wasn’t one of those arranged marriages where, for three head of sheep,¹ the skeevy older man gets to wed the underage baby maiden. This coincidence of equal birthday and anniversary (henceforth to be known as birthiversary) is completely and utterly – not to mention, mathematically – legitimate.

Sort of.

My parents first met at a wine tasting at the local Jewish Community Center, where my father, conspicuously, was the only one spitting out the wine after each sip.² It was apparently love at first spit, for nine months later, in February of 1977, they were married.

But wait! you say. That was only 33 years ago, not 65! You sir, Mr. Blogwriter, are a complete and utter – not to mention mathematical – liar!

Now, wait just a goldarn minute! How many times have I told you not to interrupt me when I’m telling a story? If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times… thus, by my calculations, I’ve now told you a thousand times. So shut up and let me finish.

After honeymooning in a snowstorm in Washington, D.C. – and celebrating my mother’s 32nd birthday – they married once again a week later, in a ceremony that satisfied my paternal grandmother’s peculiar need to involve a little thing called religion.

Although my parents have always counted their anniversaries like a normal couple, my sister and I are decidedly not normal,³ so we’ve always tallied two parental anniversaries per year. In 2010, that was their 65th and 66th.

And thus, the birthiversary was born.


¹ And perhaps a couple lodes of ore.
² A habit he continues to this day.
³ Her, especially.