By Jonathan Landaw

It is the first week of March as I write this column, and I have just celebrated my fifty-fifth birthday. Perhaps I should simply say I “observed: it, since – unlike the great majority of my friends – I have never been in the habit of “proclaiming” or making my birthday “publicly known” in the way that “to celebrate” implies. Most of the time, I would rather it pass by without anyone taking particular notice of it. In fact, I remember once a good friend of mine getting upset with me for letting my birthday pass without informing her; she said it robbed us all of a good excuse for a party.

Exactly why I am loathe to announce the arrival of this particular day is not completely clear to me. I don’t think it is fear of growing older. I say this not because I am free of this particular phobia, but because my reluctance to make a fuss over my birthday has been with me, I believe, ever since I was very young – far too young to be concerned about such an incomprehensible prospect as “growing old.” Of course, it could be a problem of self-image; maybe I don’t feel “worthy” of having a birthday party. That is an easy answer, but not a very satisfying one. After all, there is hardly any problem that isn’t one of self-image, is there? By answering everything generally, this solution answers nothing particularly. And that is what I am searching for: a specific event – a childhood trauma perhaps – to which I can point and declare, “But for you I would have been a normal, healthy American boy, celebrating the hell out of my birthday every single year and receiving gifts beyond the dreams of avarice!” Therefore, in the idiot spirit of over-simplification, as the blame-worthy trauma I nominate the time when my oldest brother sat on my birthday cake.

He was wearing corduroy pants and I can still remember my mother carrying her unexpectedly truncated creation back down to the kitchen from my bedroom (my party was taking place there because I was bedridden with chicken pox at the time) to spackle over, with some left-over frosting, the surprisingly detailed ridge pattern of parallel lines his derrière had impressed upon the cake. And no sooner had she returned with her restoration project – “There, it is as good as new,” I hear her exclaim in my mind’s ear – than he sat on it again! Fifty years have passed and I still cannot rid my mind of the image: a twice-squashed cake bearing striated indentations … and upon my brother’s backside, the chocolate obverse of the same. If that isn’t enough to put one off the whole “Happy Birthday to you” routine, what is?

In any event, my kids certainly show no such reticence when it comes to informing others that their birthdays are approaching. I have seen them go up to strangers and proclaim their imminent solar return as if it were an event so noteworthy that anything less than universal recognition of it would be downright heretical. If we had lived a few centuries ago I imagine they would have made sure that the town crier didn’t forget to alert the citizenry of the news. “Ten o’clock and all is well! Stay clear of the forest: the Duke’s men are hunting today! Mrs. Brown’s spotted cow calved this morning! And Kevin will be eight tomorrow!” And, naïve as it may sound, I don’t think my children make their announcements in order to ensure they receive more presents; they seem instead merely to be intent that an anniversary of such great significant should not pass unnoticed.

So what does all this have to do with the way I observed my birthday the other day? Virtually nothing, except for the evocation of childhood memories. I had gone to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to visit the Asian Art Museum in preparation for a tour of certain Buddhist galleries I am scheduled to lead in a few days. (By the way, speaking of tours, the one I was meant to lead in Nepal has recently been canceled owing to lack of interest. I can’t say I blame those who might have felt there was no reason to go all the way to Asia with me when simply reading this column every other month was tedious enough.) While in the park I visited the nearby Morrison Planetarium and learned that, in addition to their regularly schedule sky show, they were going to have a special “Classical Music under the Stars” program that evening. “What a nice birthday present to myself,” I thought. So at five o’clock I returned to the planetarium expecting to find a few musicians preparing for a recital of chamber music there. But that is not what happened. Instead, the narrator of that afternoon’s sky show had put together a program featuring a play of astronomical imagery set against the backdrop of recorded classical music.

The two contrasting pieces he had chosen were Barber’s Adagio for Strings (which I wasn’t well acquainted with) and Ravel’s Bolero (which I was). As the planetarium’s lights slowly dimmed, a projected image of the moon appeared partway up the dome overhead. With the increasing darkness, several of the brighter stars became visible and I immediately recognized the outline of Orion and other familiar landmarks of the evening sky. As the darkness became more and more profound, the dome seemed to dissolve … and as the observed details of the sky became clearer and more abundant, the dimensions of heavens receded further and further towards infinity. Starting on Earth with the moon set against the Zodiac next to the Pleiades, we were transported out to where the Galilean satellites danced their cyclic rhythms about Jupiter. Then out beyond the solar system to where the spiral arms of the Milky Way whirled in terrible silence, and further still to where a snowstorm of smudge-like nebulosities resolved themselves into a galaxy of galaxies.

This journey into the infinitude of space, colored by the Adagio‘s yearning for tonal resolution, spoke to me in accents I recalled from my childhood when similar journeys within the dome of the Haydn Planetarium in New York City, accompanied by the strains of Tchaikovsky, first introduced me to an intimation of boundlessness that, years later, was to seek its own spiritual resolution in the union of emptiness and compassion.

After Bolero crashed to its completion, I thanked the producer of this extraordinary show and told him how it reminded me of my visits to the New York sky theater. “I grew up in Brooklyn,” he replied, “and often visited the Haydn myself.” If he turns out to be a fan of Pee-wee Reese and the Brooklyn Dodgers, this could be the start of a great friendship!