Congrats, John - looking forward to hearing the legend of your day of legality sometime soon!
I've had a few really good birthdays.
One summer, I was probably around five or six, my older brother and I had made a lot of friends near my mom's new home. Suddenly, around mid-August or so, they started running off without me, leaving me behind. I wasn't happy about it at all. But on my birthday, I finally realized why - they were making me a push-type go-cart! I was pretty excited to see it, and to know that's why they were ditching me.
My eleventh birthday was my first after having seen
Star Wars and I was spending the weekend with Mom again. She took me to a nearby shopping center, we ate out and she let me pick and choose the gifts I wanted - in the end, I got an armful of Star Wars action figures and a green, zippered, hooded sweatshirt (this was LONG before they were called "hoodies"). I loved the action figures and I wore that sweatshirt everywhere, probably to the point that it became threadbare. I picked up a new one, very much like the original, about a year or two ago and I like that one just as much.
My twenty-third birthday had the makings of being a big bust. I was living near Fort Lauderdale, Florida and I'd invited a lot of people to my new apartment I was sharing with two other people - both of my roomies were out for the day. I made a lot of chili, a few pounds of the stuff. But after several hours, no one had arrived. Finally I got a call from a friend I met through the radio station where I was volunteering and had learned to become a deejay, including getting an FCC license I still have today - I can operate an AM- or FM-band transmitter up to 100,000 watts. She was crying and upset - her boyfriend of several months had broken up with her. I invited her to my place so we could go out and do something together.
I took her in my borrowed car to a local pool hall - and got a ticket! My stepfather was doing some work on my car as a birthday gift and I was using his. I didn't realize why he kept the high-beam headlights on all the time until I was pulled over. I'd turned on the low-beams and one of them wasn't working - equipment violation! But I didn't let it ruin the night.
We hung out at the pool hall drinking beers and having fun - it cheered us both up. We followed that up with a trip to another bar, this one a British-style pub with several dart boards, and played a few rounds with a few pints. I was still considered legal - the blood-alcohol content limit was higher back then - by the time we were heading back, in part because I eased off the beers. My friend, however, wasn't as lucky - she drank into a light stupor and vomited in the parking lot of my apartment complex when we returned to my place. This was followed by a fantastic make-out session - I was on a dry spell, not having had a date in too many months. She crashed on the couch and I crashed in my room, feeling a lot better about the world.
It all got crushed the next day when she reconciled with her boyfriend, but it was good while it lasted.
Then there's the most recent good birthday. My forty-fifth birthday in 2012. After having known my "new" girlfriend for over a year and moving in together, we got married on that day during a trip to Florida. The ceremony was presided over by my childhood friend's stepdad, someone I've known for many years. (It's easy to perform marriages in Florida, you only need to be a notary public!) We had the wedding at his place he shared with my friend's mom - her, I've known since age 10! The trip itself was a bit of a challenge - it started with me having a miserable head cold and was followed shortly after the wedding by a category-1 hurricane! But I've never been happier in my whole life since childhood. By the way, if you ever want to clear a waiting room in a semi-tropical environment, start violently sneezing and looking miserable! Most of them couldn't tell a cold from the Hanta virus!
The ironic thing is that it wasn't just my birthday and our wedding day - it was also my wife's anniversary to her first husband! We decided to do it so she'd have better memories of that date in the future, remembering our time together instead of theirs.
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