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George Spyros, 44, executive producer: I got married the weekend before. We had a bunch of friends and family from out of town, and went out Monday night for dinner. My wife and I were supposed to fly out on September 11^th for our honeymoon. On top of that, it’s my birthday.

Michael Wright, 44, editorial director: September 11^th has always been the best day of the year for me—and then it all goes to shit.

Allison Spensley, 31, mid-career change: It was my 21^st birthday, so of course I had plans to go out.

Ochia Nsor, 29, quality assurance officer: In my family we have this tradition where whoever’s birthday it is, we all sing “Happy Birthday” when they wake up. That didn’t happen.

Will Beers, 25, computer specialist: It was my 15^th, when you can get your learner’s permit. So I was actually in line at the DMV that morning in Miami with my dad.

Rob Knox, 40, commercial producer: I was woken up by a neighbor pounding on my door saying, “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV!” Really no thoughts about my birth at that point.

Evan Boorstyn, 45, publishing: I was at "The Today Show" with an author who was being interviewed at the time of the attacks. He’s basically the guy whose face they showed when Matt Lauer said they were going to breaking news.

Jessica Ford, 35, costume designer: I was on the train headed to Grand Central station. It was before cell phones were so prevalent, but a few people on the train had state-of-the-art phones. I remember someone said, “Something happened at the World Trade Center.”

Michael Wright: I thought it was like the World War II plane, where it was an accident. But then the second plane hit and that’s when you knew something terrible had gone on.

Hillary Kaye, 30, graduate student: I was in Berkeley where I went to school, fast asleep, and the phone rang. It was my dad. He was like, “Hillary, look what you did now. You brought in World War III!” Which is a nice way to wake up.

Jessica Ford: We got on the subway platform, and there was this mushroom cloud. There was a homeless man on the platform with a sign that said, “The end of the world is happening. Repent! Repent! Repent!”

Hillary Kaye: I think I was going to have some type of a party, but we just sat around and watched TV and ordered Chinese food.

Ochia Nsor: It was the first time I realized my birthday was 9-1-1, you know? I never thought of it like that before.

Will Beers: Especially because of the numerology. 9-1-1 is so easy to remember. “9/11” was such an innocuous thing.

Evan Boorstyn: And to hear “9/11” repeated so often, everywhere, when up until that point the only people talking about that day were people celebrating my birthday.

Jotham Sederstrom: My new boss was calling for three different reasons. He’d known it was my birthday. So he told me, listen, because of 9/11 we’re clearing out a portion of the sports department and we’re not going to need you to come in tonight. So, one, thanks for doing a great job. Two, we don’t need you to work tonight. And three, we’re working on getting you a raise.

Rob Knox: It was weird later in the day when the people in the office were singing this zombified attempt at “Happy Birthday.” They’d already bought the cake.

Jotham Sederstrom: Be nice when you write it, though. I don’t want it to sound like I’m gloating. But it was kind of a decent day for me in that way.

Allison Spensley: A few of us decided we’d still go out for my birthday, so we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. They had those huge TVs, usually with football and basketball and whatnot on. But there was news on every single TV. It was so somber. We had a couple of drinks and called it a night.

Evan Boorstyn: I was just sitting on the couch watching TV, and someone who lived near me called and said, “You’re going out. It’s your birthday, no matter what happens.” So we had some drinks.

Will Beers: My parents and I rented a movie to watch that night. The first Meet the Parents. It was supposed to be funny and light-hearted, and it was just, like, we’re not really enjoying this at all.

Jessica Ford: We ate an awkward meal in this restaurant. We were the only ones in there, and then the waiter came out and sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish. It just felt so inappropriate.

Michael Wright: If I get carded or walk into a bank, they kind of look at you and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And it’s like, “Fuck you, it’s my birthday.”

Ochia Nsor: Others have this loud laughter. It’s uncomfortable laughter. But there’s always a reaction. I always get a reaction.

Allison Spensley: “Ooohhh, honey. Oh, that’s too bad.”

Rob Knox: They show me this sympathy.

Jessica Ford: People usually wince. Or say, “I’m sorry. That sucked.”

George Spyros: Shortly thereafter, I was shooting something at West Point and showed my driver’s license and they’re like, “Oh, 9/11...” It’s, like, respect.

Jotham Sederstrom: When people do notice your birthday’s on 9/11, you develop a little way of reacting to it. You make awkward jokes like, “Never forget.” Shit like that. Just because so many people have said something, you have a way that you respond.

Hillary Kaye: I always make light of it by saying, “If we were at a sporting event and there were 40,000 people watching a game, and one person got shit on by a bird, it would be me.” It’s just my luck.

Will Beers: “Well, maybe we’ll make it a holiday.”

Evan Boorstyn: And then of course you run into people who don’t even make the connection. I’m always amazed at airports when they’re checking IDs, how many people don’t bat an eye. Not that they’re supposed to do anything about it, but…

Rob Knox: I compare it to my grandfather’s generation when people were born on Pearl Harbor day. For a decade or two, people were very aware of December 7^th.

Jessica Ford: It’s like being born on D-Day. It’s the biggest tragedy we’ve experienced in our lifetime. So I can’t say, “Gosh, I hate that it ruined my birthday.”

Jotham Sederstrom: Something I realized a little after the fact was that my mom was born on Pearl Harbor Day. So, there’s definitely no feelings of “why me?”

George Spyros: There was never a thought of, “Why would this happen on my birthday?” It just never computed for me.

Evan Boorstyn: I never took it personally.

Jessica Ford: I feel like I have a morbid outlook anyway, so if it was going to happen to anyone, it would happen to me.

Hillary Kaye: Aside from the fact that it’s a huge tragedy and ruined many people’s lives, in my own selfish world I’m like, “Of course, it’s on my birthday.”

Allison Spensley: I guess I was a little bummed out, but there are far worse things than having your party ruined.

Hillary Kaye: Definitely I didn’t do anything that year. It felt weird to send out an Evite.

Jotham Sederstrom: The very next year, I moved to New York. And at the time, there was like this dividing line. You know, the people who were there for that and the people who weren’t. I remember feeling a little bit like a foreigner, so I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it

Will Beers: But I did get a car that next year, since it was my 16^th. So it was still kind of positive.

Michael Wright: The first year I was like everyone else, just bummed out, not even halfway in the mind of celebrating. But the second year I was like, fuck that, I’m reclaiming it. My band played, we had a big party, everybody drank, had a grand old time. We kind of took it back.

George Spyros: There’s this weird sense of responsibility to celebrate life. I know everyone’s hung up with it being about the people who died and mourning. But how do you celebrate someone’s life and the meaning it had for those people who died? You double your commitments to living and living life well.

Hillary Kaye: I think enough time’s passed where it’s socially acceptable to be born on that day and still want to do something. There’s not this stigma attached to it.

Rob Knox: There’s me, Harry Connick Jr., Kristy McNichol and, rest in peace, Tom Landry. All born on 9/11. You should probably call Kristy McNichol. I’m sure she’s hoping somebody will call.

[Kristy McNichol could not be reached for comment.]

George Spyros: Sometimes, filling out stuff online on Trip Advisor or whatever, when the TSA wants to know your birthday. Whenever I’m typing in “9/11,” I feel like someone at the NSA is watching. The paranoia that I’m some Al-Qaeda person and they’re going to be like, “He must be one of the bad guys because he likes that bad things happened to America.” It’s a crazy non-logic.

Rob Knox: Before it was, “Hey, isn’t your birthday in September?” And now it’s not necessarily people who should know my exact birthday, know it.

Ochia Nsor: People are always aware of my birthday now.

Will Beers: So that’s positive. People never forget it.

Evan Boorstyn: There are a couple of people who say “I’ll never forget your birthday now.” But human nature being what it is, they’re usually the people who do.

George Spyros: The short answer is whether or not I remember birthdays before 9/11.

Allison Spensley: Before? There was less alcohol. Just because I was not yet of age.

Rob Knox: People are willing to say “Happy Birthday” to me the last couple of years without both of us having to stop and take a moment and have caveats.

Jessica Ford: Ten years later, it still feels inappropriate to make birthday plans on my actual birthday.

Allison Spensley: Now I’m at the age where I don’t have to celebrate them at all anymore!

Hillary Kaye: Although I think this year will be another … because of the media and the events planned around the 10^th anniversary, it’ll jog people’s memories.

Michael Wright: There’s all these reasons to stay in this year, but it’s not that I’m bummed out because it’s the 10^th anniversary. It’s because I’m content to sit at the table and watch my three year old and one year old make a mess of themselves. You know?

Jotham Sederstrom: For the first few years after, if I called anyone up to say, “It’s my birthday, let’s get a drink,” I was worried some people would a. not want to celebrate on that day, or b. actually have some kinds of plans related to honoring the dead. These days if I have some friends who can’t make it, it’s because of Fashion Week.

Will Beers: Yeah, it’s odd. But then again, it could have been on any other of the 364 days of the year.


N.B. All ages as of 9/11/11.

Rick Paulas can be reached at rickpaulas at gmail dot com.

Illustration from a photo by Amanda Slater; art direction by Joe MacLeod and Tom Scocca.

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My mother, a former preacher, would call it a warning. She may not have her own church anymore, but she still believes the Second Coming is nigh. She may, in fact, actually expect to be whisked off to heaven on my birthday. I’m not going to ask. After a six-year break from each other (it's complicated), we get along really well now that we don't argue about God anymore; when she alludes to Him or anything else I don't want to talk about, I change the subject. I'm an increasingly fervent agnostic, if there can be such a thing: compulsively uncertain, committed to doubt. I don't believe in any deity—and certainly not the Christian one, whose unfairness and sadism are so repellent that even if He did exist I would gladly forgo His company to burn in hell with people I actually like.

The tedium of heaven is obvious, I know, and, having been so roundly mocked by so many, barely merits further remarking upon, but my grandmother, my mom's mom, once had a near-death experience, dreamed of a lavish mansion reserved for her in heaven and awoke cursing at the prospect of spending eternity there. Is it possible to imagine a more dismal place than one where there is no sex and no joking and everyone sings all the time?

A confession, one sure to enrage fervid atheists: though I don't expect the End of the World to be set in motion this Saturday night, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it were. Fatalism comes easy when you grew up bracing for the apocalypse, being told that that, sometime very soon, probably next year but possibly tomorrow morning, a fiery mountain would fall into the sea, the oceans would turn to blood and then the moon would, and soon after that a third of all living things on the earth would die. Never mind homework, forget the boy you had a crush on, it would be best to turn down the lead role in the school musical, for there was no time to waste. Jesus could return at any moment, that was the crucial thing, and it was our duty to spread the word. Also, to repent, because if you hadn't been forgiven for every sin you'd ever committed, no matter how tiny, even if you didn't know it was a sin, you'd be regrettably yet decisively Left Behind. Rapture Readiness is a hilarious cliche in the popular culture now, but it's no joke when you live it. I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake, obsessively begging the Lord for forgiveness, at the age of eight.

You get steeped in this stuff as a kid, even if some part of you was always skeptical, it's hard to lose the residual sense that everything unfolding in the world—from natural disasters to commerce and geopolitics—signals some approaching doomsday. Or maybe this sort of existential dread is actually just genetic. It seems to run in my mom's family.

***

Perhaps you're gearing up to spend May 21 at a Rapture party or gassing up your car for some post-Rapture looting. Some of you may even expect to end the night seated at the right hand of God. I intend to be touring the bars of Provincetown—"an absolute sink of corruption," my friend Joan assures me—drunk as a clam at high tide, when the hour arrives.

Obviously, given that it coincides with my fortieth, I'll have much more on my mind than Jesus' failure to return. The withering of my body, the decline of my intellect (such as it is), and the rapid approach of the grave, not to mention my continued failure to finish, to my satisfaction, the last two chapters of this godforsaken book I'm writing. Just to offer some highlights.

Compared to the hardcore Rapturites, though, I'm in pretty good shape. Did you hear the interviews on NPR last weekend? "It broke my heart," my friend D.E. said in email. "There was this one couple with a baby and one on the way and they'd pretty much spent their last dime. You have to just hear the voices of these people. They're totally lost." She's right, it's tragic.

The architect of this particular Rapture scare is Harold Camping, a former engineer who claims to have found numerical clues in the Bible. He "first predicted the end would come Sept. 6, 1994" but now contends that, as of that date, he simply "had not completed his biblical research. 'For example, I at that time had not gone through the Book of Jeremiah,' he explains, 'which is a big book in the Bible that has a whole lot to say about the end of the world.'" On his blog, Camping writes: "Many of you have contacted me to ask what I will do on May 22, after the May 21 Judgement [sic] Day. I’ve been asked what I will do with my things, and if I will give them away to those who write an entire one line email to me. After the May 21 Rapture, many of us will no longer be here, but this blog will live on. I have scheduled new posts to come out between May 21st and October 21st 2011, that will help those dealing with the End Times of the Apocalypse. [Emphasis mine.] If you do not think you will be saved in the May 21 Judgement [sic] Day Rapture, then please bookmark this page now to visit on May 22." "Now that's service," D.E. said.

"If I'm here on May 22, and I wake up," Camping told NPR, "I'm going to be in hell." My favorite rejoinder to his predictions? "After He stood me up on September 6, 1994? He could've at least called!"

***

An unusual aspect of Camping's Judgment Day catechism is that, like the Puritans' and the Presbyterians', but unlike most evangelicals', it rests on the notion of predestination—that some people, the elect, are chosen by God for salvation, while the rest will perish. I say "unusual" because Rapture-readiness scaremongering originated with Hal Lindsey's bestselling 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth, which is decidedly not a predestination text. Lindsey, like the Methodists and the Baptists and the Pentecostals, is a big-tent guy. If you ask Jesus to forgive your sins and invite Him into your heart, under the Lindsey doctrine you are guaranteed salvation. This openness, with its emphasis on God's endless capacity to forgive, has been the emerging trend in Protestantism, so it's a little surprising to see Camping's date—and far more restrictive vision of Eternal Life—getting so much attention.

For his part, on his own website, Lindsey—who once wrote, "the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it"—offers the following wisdom: "I want all of my friends to know that I AM AGAINST any form of predicting a specific day that the end of this age and the Rapture will occur. I am well aware that a Christian teacher has predicted that the end of this age will occur on May 21st 2011. When this fails, it will be used by our enemies to discredit the expectation that the Rapture could take place at any-moment."

All of which is to say that the End Times fables of fundamentalist Protestants are multitudinous and fractious; minor denominations have actually splintered over them. A popular wall poster in the 1980s—one forever selling out of stock and being reordered at my mother's storefront church/bookstore—depicted cars and planes crashing as their righteous drivers rose, ethereal and glowing, into the sky. Jesus would whisk the believers up to Heaven, my mother explained, and the heathens remaining would have to endure not just the aftermath of a million fiery collisions but the rest of the Tribulation. You could still be saved if you weren't Raptured up, but it would be difficult. I'd go over the details, but it seems wrong to lead you any further into this doctrinal thicket.

Suffice it to say that there are a thousand iterations, at least, of the Rapture story, each with its own creative, deeply punitive twist. If you're looking for confirmation in the plain language of the scriptures, however, you won't find much. John Nelson Darby invented the pre-tribulation Rapture doctrine in the 19th century by stitching together verses from various parts of the Bible.

Mark Twain once wrote about the trouble he had gathering material for his childhood biography of Satan. "There were only five or six [facts]," he recalled. "You could set them all down on a visiting-card." With the help of his Sunday school teacher, "on fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the 'conjectures,' and 'suppositions,' and 'maybes,' and 'perhapses,' and 'doubtlesses,' and 'rumors,' and 'guesses,' and 'probabilities,' and 'likelihoods,' and 'we are permitted to thinks,' and 'we are warranted in believings,' and 'might have beens,' and 'could have beens,' and 'must have beens,' and 'unquestionablys,' and 'without a shadow of doubts.'” Predictions of the impending apocalypse have about the same level of textual support. "What God lacks is convictions — stability of character," Twain quipped. "He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something — not try to be everything."

***

My mother was raised an atheist by an atheist Texan mother who herself had a stridently atheist Texan father. As far as I know, Mom remained contentedly godless through college. When I was three or four, she and my dad became Presbyterians, but she soon started reading the Bible for herself and questioning the catechism and she ultimately left the flock in fury over predestination after the minister told the parents of a boy killed by a speeding car that his death had been God's will. My parents' attempts to compromise on other denominations didn't go so well; Mom argued with the pastors and the Sunday school teachers; the Baptists actually asked us to leave. Soon she had her own Bible study, and was speaking in tongues and laying hands on the sick and casting out demons, and eventually, first in our living room and finally in a warehouse, she had her own church. People were scandalized; a woman preaching was an aggressive act.

What's most remarkable to me now about her sudden religiosity is that the zeal and the leadership impulses that seemed in my childhood to spring up out of nowhere have forerunners she was barely, if at all, aware of. One of her grandmothers was a "devoted Pentecostal 'holy roller'" (my mother's words) who not only donated her son's insurance proceeds (from an accident that left him a paraplegic) to the church but, at some point at least, actually lived in it. Mom knew this growing up, but vaguely; her dad's family was something of an abstraction. Then, a few years ago, long after her own place of worship was shuttered, she learned that her maternal grandmother's sister and niece had joined together and "voluntarily started and pastored the only church in Stockard for many years until they finally got a man to come in from somewhere and take over."

Okay, it's not as if religious fervor was scarce in 20th-Century Texas. But recently I discovered that Mary Bliss Parsons, my ninth great-grandmother and my mom's eighth, beat witchcraft charges—twice—in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her husband Joseph moved the family because Mary couldn’t get along with the people of Springfield. She was beautiful and opinionated, with a “harsh,” “often accusatory” manner, and she was given to “fits” that incited Joseph to lock her in the basement. According to the authors of Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England:

She and her husband were frequently and notoriously at odds with one another. During part of their time at Springfield he had sought to confine her to their house. (Otherwise, he said, “she would go out in the night … and when she went out a woman went with her and came in with her.”) When this tactic failed, he locked her in the basement. It was then, she claimed later on, that she had first encountered her “spirits.” There was at least one quite public episode — again at Springfield — that amounted to a family free-for-all. Joseph was “beating one of his little children, for losing its shoe,” when Mary came running “to save it, because she had beaten it before as she said.” Whereupon Joseph thrust her away, and the two of them continued to struggle until he “had in a sort beaten [her].”

Witchcraft accusations surfaced soon after the family settled in Northampton. Mary gave birth to a healthy baby boy—her fifth child—and the following year a neighbor’s newborn died. When the grieving mother claimed Mary had cursed the baby, Joseph tried to protect the family’s good(?) name by going on the offensive. No stranger to the courtroom, he initiated a defamation suit against the neighbor who'd started the rumors. This approach was tricky, and fraught; while the "immediate outcome of [slander] actions was usually favorable to the plaintiff," the "long-range effects were mixed."

Sure enough, Joseph prevailed, but suspicion and ill-feeling roiled until new witchcraft claims landed Mary in court again 18 years later. This time she was the defendant. Most of the evidence from the criminal trial has been lost, but the indictment remains:

Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons, ... being instigated by the Devil, hath ... entered into familiarity with the Devil, and committed several acts of witchcraft on the person or persons of one or more.

It's interesting, to me at least, to ponder the parallels between her story and my mother's life. Both women were difficult and nonconforming and, by some accounts, mad; both purported to encounter spirits; both were accused of Devil Worship. When I was a child, the Presbyterians and Baptists all but called Mom a Satanist as they showed us the door. The legacy of loudmouthed, intractable women might run back in the other direction, too. By all accounts Mary's mother Margaret was prickly and litigious, a force among Puritans.

I can’t speak for the rest of the gene pool, but the women in my branch of Mary’s tree are basically all, in different ways, misfits. Eccentricities and diagnosable mental illnesses vary, but the common theme is an unwillingness to bend to the expectations of polite society, a.k.a. a need to pursue our weird interests and passions whenever, wherever, and however we want.

***

When my incomparable stepdaughter, now 17, was visiting recently, I told her how pathetic I always found it at her age when adults would say, "Can you believe I'm 40? I don't feel 40! I still feel 22!" And I would look at their eye wrinkles and their dull hair and mom jeans and I would think, Well, you sure do look 40, so suck it up. Jeez. Knowing how obnoxious I was to my mother in my teenage years, I wouldn't be surprised if I actually said those words to her. I said far worse, that I do know.

Obviously I don't think 40 is the end of the road—some of my favorite people are closer to twice that. It's just that some of us age more naturally, more gracefully, more normally than others. I think a lot these days about the fact that I haven't had children; it's not that I regret the decision, just that it sets me apart, defines me in some way I’m not sure I was prepared to commit to. I'm a reluctant New Yorker, a loving but irregular wife, a refugee from the practice of law, a blogger who's lost interest in regular blogging, a critic who never planned to be one and a supposed writer who's only now finishing her first novel. What the hell, in other words, am I doing with my life?

Before my mom turned 70 last June, we had gone six years without speaking. When I called to wish her a happy birthday, though, we started talking and didn't want to stop. Her passions are as extreme and unpredictable as always, and sometimes have unfortunate consequences—she sleeps with a shower curtain between her sheets and bedspread so that she doesn't have to get up in the night if one of her ten dogs has an accident—but they are never boring.

Mom has been a cat hoarder, a bird breeder, a dog rescuer and, of course, a preacher. Nowadays she has turned her attention to fruit trees. My stepfather jokes that she confuses them with sofas because she's always wanting him to uproot them and move them around. She has 20 apple trees, four apricot, five nectarine, six peach, three cherry, one mulberry, five pear (of four varieties), one plum, a dwarf lemon or two, and four or five elderberry bushes. No doubt this is a sad statement on what one finds interesting at midlife, but I love to hear her talk about them. In fact, at first, my joy at being back in touch with her was so extreme that I would often sit at my computer for the duration of our conversations, quietly typing up everything she said.

"I hit the jackpot last year, as I usually do," Mom told me last summer. "I went to Kmart in, oh, I guess May or June, and I spied these wonderful dwarf trees that grow to be about six or seven feet tall. They were $50 apiece. I wasn't about to pay that, but I kept looking at them and looking at them, and they didn't sell any, so they marked them down to $25, and I bought three, and then they went to $18 and I bought three more, and then they eventually dropped down to $8 and I bought the rest. They don't give you as much fruit as a great big tree would, but you can't get the fruit up at the top of a great big tree." Later, the unseasonable heat had her worried. "I have a whole bunch of grapes. I've got thousands of grapes out there, but the leaves that shelter the grapes from the sun are starting to look kind of brown and downcast." Downcast leaves! This is the way she speaks, bluntly, rhythmically, sometimes poetically. I needed the time away from her, but I also really missed her.

So, does my mother expect to be Raptured up on my fortieth birthday? Does she see me as her wayward lamb, a child out of touch with Jesus who will be Left Behind to endure the Tribulation? Is she, even now, jarring and canning food so that my sister and I will have plenty of pickles, prunes and jams if we can make it down to her house in the midst of the apocalypse? I don’t know.

I do know that she has 40 fruit trees, is obsessed with demons, lives in surroundings more characteristic of Hoarders than Good Housekeeping, is completely self-reliant and seems remarkably happy. Whatever else she is, my mother is living proof that getting older doesn't predestine anything. And on May 22, 2011, when I awake in Cape Cod with a colossal hangover, all the wrinkles on my face cast into full relief by dehydration, I'm sure that will serve, if not as inspiration exactly, as some sort of consolation.

Maud Newton is a writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written about books since 2002.

Photo by [mementosis], via Flickr.

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Five months ago, I argued in these pages (in the comments section of these pages) in support of April’s “standard cheeriness.” I said, in fact, that this month might well be “one of the top three months.” Man, such sentiment seems awfully far away now, as we slog, slightly hung-over from Opening Day beer, through this bullshit half-snow dampening our day. You know what? I take it back: You suck, April!

What do we have to look forward to this month anyway? Taxes. And, of course, death. We can always count on death. There’s bound to be lots of it this month. There always is. Martin Luther King, Jr., Kurt Cobain, Cozy Powell, Saul Bellow, Linda McCartney, Christopher Robin Milne (appropriately enough), Left Eye, Ottawa Nation chief Pontiac, they all died this month. Jesus, too, if you believe in him.

Lots of births, too, of course. Because that keeps happening. (Until the planet reaches some kind of Children of Men state, at least, which seems likelier with each successive nuclear power-plant disaster.) Haley Joel Osment, Mandy Moore, God Shammgod and Posh Spice all celebrate birthdays this month. Hitler was born, famously, on the 20th. And now everything looks like him. Also, crazy people too often mark his birthday by doing something crazy and terrible. (This also happens the day before, the 19th, which is the anniversary of the ATF’s 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.) And people smoke lots of pot. And giant oil rigs blow up in the ocean and spill out oil that kills more whales and dolphins than we initially realize. And Joey Lawrence was born that day, too, in 1976. Ellen Barkin and the Budhha were born on other days in April.

Then there’s Good Friday, which, what’s so good about it? And Easter. Easter’s all right, I guess. Except for the stupid hats. But the lamb is delicious, with mint sauce, which always seems nice and Aprilly. And Passover seders, which can be enjoyable, as long as whoever’s leading them doesn’t insist on devoting a lot of time to every page in the Haggadah. Like, can we just get the afikomen already? I like singing "Dayenu," though. And gefilte fish. I like ramps and shad, a lot, too, which come around in April. The food actually starts to get pretty delicious this month. Maybe that’s what I was thinking about when I said how great April was. The trees and plants grow their leaves back, and we can eat them or just admire their pretty green color. And I do love baseball and I’m happy it’s here. There’s something especially nice about the meaninglessness of April baseball games, too. So maybe it’s important to keep the whole April-showers-bring-May-flowers thing in mind today. It is best to try to achieve something like that which David Foster apparently hit on in his unfinished but now published novel, The Pale King, which Michiko Kakutani reviews in today’s Times.

“Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”

Of course, David Foster Wallace was unable to do this himself. And if you suffer from allergies, April showers are really not worth it at all, and only contributing to further misery.

Oh, and you know who else died this month? Harvey Ball, the graphic designer who invented the world-famous “smiley face.” Ten years ago on the 12th. So, yeah.

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Sorry for stinking.

You were seven years old at the time, which was December 19th, 1991. I remember because I had just turned 21. The day before, as a matter of fact. You were in the first grade at a school for emotionally disturbed children in New Jersey, where I worked, as an assistant to your teacher, Suzanne.

You had been having a hard enough year already. Your mother had died. She'd been murdered, Suzanne had told me, and-and this is beyond anything I can imagine-you saw it happen. You were living with your mom's family, your grandmother and your uncles. But it was not an optimal situation. There were drug and alcohol problems in the household, apparently. You had been removed from your local mainstream school because you'd been having trouble controlling your anger. You'd been lashing out physically, and it had become a safety issue. Much of my job for the first couple of months you were in Suzanne's class consisted of sitting with you on the linoleum floor, holding you in the official restraint position I'd been taught-your arms wrapped across your chest in an X, each of your legs pinned under one of my own-as you screamed and thrashed against me. You hit me and kicked me plenty of times. It never hurt too badly. You threw a chair at me once, which hurt a little more. But still, you were just seven.

And a really lovely kid besides. You were smart and warm and wiseacre funny and we spent a lot of calmer time talking. My father had died that year, too. And one of the reasons Suzanne assigned me to you directly, she said, was because you were better able to open up to me.

We were sitting at your desk once, working in your math workbook, when you got quiet and turned to me and asked me if I had pictures of my father at my house. I said yes, I did. Your family had recently put away all the pictures of your mother; seeing them had been making you too upset.

"I don't even remember what she looks like," you said, and you held your head in your hands and started to cry in a different way than how kids usually cry.

In many respects, that job at the school is the hardest I've ever worked. It wasn't long hours, 8:30-2:30, something like that. But though I usually drank four or five cups of coffee in that time everyday, as soon as I got home, I'd fall into my bed and fall asleep for the rest of the afternoon. In hindsight, I guess I might have been suffering a touch of depression. As much as I liked you and the other kids in the class, as rewarding as I found the job, my life was not the way I wanted it to be. I was living with my mom and my sister, getting used to the house without my father in it. My mom had converted my old bedroom into an office, so I was sleeping downstairs, on a convertible couch we left open, in what had been a waiting room for my dad's clients-he was a psychologist with a home-office private practice. The moss-green carpeting in there was left over from the '70s and it made a squishy sound when you stepped on it. Most of my friends from high school were away at their colleges. I was taking night classes at Brookdale Community College and spending a lot of time alone.

I decided I had to get out of there. So I made sure I got good grades at Brookdale and sent my transcripts up to my original college's deans' office as soon as I'd earned enough make-up credits. I had already started the process of returning to Connecticut by mid-December, when people were arriving home for Christmas break, but I was none-the-less eager to socialize. The night of my 21st birthday, my friend Mark, who had turned 21 in August, took me out for my first legal drink in a bar. We went to Brannigan's, an Irish pub down by Marine Park in Red Bank. It was a Thursday night, and we chose Brannigans because we figured it would be less crowded than the more-popular Globe Bar across the street, but there were still lots of beefy guys in goatees and overcoats-we were still in New Jersey in the early '90s.

My first legal drink turned into very many, of course. With various strangers and people I knew buying me birthday shots. Much of the night is a blur in my memory. The way it ended, though, is all too clear. Two guys I knew from high school, Darren and Mike, they'd graduated a couple years before Mark and I, they were drinking down at the far end of the bar. They never liked me and my friends much, I don't think. Darren knew karate, we'd learned one night a few years before, when he'd choked my buddy Dave almost to death once during a fight at a party over a girl. (It was scary. Dave lost consciousness, all these blood vessels in his eyes burst. He looked like a Halloween mask for weeks.) And Mike, who had worked delivering pizzas for the same pizza place that I did, had warned me, on my first day on the job, not to accept offers of sex from any of my delivery customers. "Trust me," he said, "Don't go inside. There's gonna be some big dude in there waiting to jump out and beat the shit out of you." All right, I told him. I wasn't expecting this to ever happen. He went on, "Don't get me wrong. I've banged my share of customers-we all have. But you gotta be careful." I never knew quite what to make of that. He was not the type of guy you would ever believe had had sex with pizza delivery customers. But, then, I don't know.

Anyway, the night at Brannigans, when I had already been over-served to a point where my drinks were probably no longer legal, Darren and Mike called me over to say they wanted to buy me a shot. A "cement mixer," Mike said. His smile was a sneer. And I should have been leery, but I was too drunk to care.

A warning: If anyone ever offers to buy you a cement mixer, do not accept. It is not a real shot. As it turns out, a cement mixer is a mix of Bailey's Irish Cream and lime juice. The lime juice curdles the cream, turning it to a consistency not unlike that of wet cement. I vomited soon after gulping it down. Right on the bar, which made the bartender very angry. (Though it was as much his fault as anyone's, for serving me such a not-funny "gag" drink in the first place.) He demanded that I leave, and Mark ended up in a shouting match with him that almost turned into a fist-fight, and we were both eventually removed from the premises by force. And, pathetically, I found myself officially "banned for life" from the establishment that had served me my first legal alcoholic drink.

I probably should have called in sick to work the next day. But I was still pretty drunk when I woke up, and didn't realize how bad my hangover would get. Also, I wouldn't have wanted to let Suzanne down, or you, or any of the other kids in the class.

By around 10:30 or so that morning, it was clear I'd made a mistake. The class was in its gym period, and I was lying with my face against the cool, rubberized floor. You were supposed to be playing kickball or Red Light/Green Light or something, but were instead leaning on me and talking to me-at me, mostly; I wasn't doing a very good job of talking back. My head was ringing with pain, and my skin felt clammy underneath my clothes.

"What's wrong?" you asked me.

"I don't feel very good today," I said, trying to breathe as slowly as I could.

You sniffed the air and said, "You stink!"

"Thanks," I said.

"You smell like whiskey," you said.

I had been feeling bad about the fact that I was planning to leave to go back up to college for the next semester. I don't remember whether I'd told you yet or not. Right then, though, considering the various elements of your situation at home and at school, I had the thought that you might be better off without me. Not that that made me feel any less guilty. I knew I stunk.

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