The following week my birthday arrived, as foretold. And I don't know whether it was in honor of my birthday or what, but nature did seem to be throwing a party. All over the place, fiddlehead ferns unfurled like blow-out noisemakers, confetti petals streamed from the fruit trees, and whirligigs zigzagged through the air like ticker tape. Spring was the present I got from the valley, and it was just what I wanted. Which was fortunate, because spring would be hard to exchange.
Mid-afternoon I heard five quick knocks at the front door: shave and a haircut, minus its two-bit punch line. I hurried down the hall and opened the door, and poof!-there were packages on the doorstep like a benevolent prank. I looked left, I looked right, but there was no sign of the mailman. I even looked up into the sky, in case he'd made an assumption. But no matter how quickly I got to my mailbox or door, the mailman, like oldschool Snuffleupagus or the light inside a refrigerator, could never be observed.
Unlike the hypothetical mailman, I had no policy against receiving gifts (and in fact I kind of preferred them to curses). And that was good, because the packages were in fact birthday presents.
From Daddy, I got an ersatz slice of birthday cake sculpted out of vinyl (such as one might see displayed in the finer chain restaurants), and also an electronics store gift card which, between you and me, was a bit off the mark, dollars-to-years ratio-wise. I'm not sure whether that means my worth per year has been reappraised at a lower value by wily insurance adjusters, or whether Daddy believes I've found a magic youngerizer. Maybe there really is such a thing these days, and I've just never heard about it. That's what I get for not subscribing to the Acme catalog.
From Dougie, I got three drawings, a dozen pre-stamped blank envelopes, and twenty-four clean sheets of paper. Envelopes and paper are two things he can get at the commissary, but he has to save up for them. It must have taken him since Christmas to buy them all. I looked carefully at the stamps. They appeared to be good, although with Dougie it was hard to be sure.
The three drawings were, like all of Dougie's drawings, extremely realistic. The first showed a corner of the yard-a rather dusty area with a high, rusty-looking fence and dozens of small birds, probably starlings, perched atop it. The second picture showed Dougie's roommate, asleep, agape, and drooling. The third was an impressive likeness of a toilet, its gleaming curves so perfectly rendered as to appear three dimensional. Maybe these weren't the prettiest of pictures, but for what they were, they were really good. They were the "good grapefruit juice" of drawings.
From Mama, I got the usual fruit basket-this one containing three exotic apples and three exotic pears, and six tiny wheels of cheese from Wisconsin, where not much happens except cheese. I don't really like cheese all that much, but for cheese it was pretty good. I guess that's because Wisconsin really concentrates on it.
The apples and pears were aesthetically perfect specimens, paragons of pear-dom and acmes of apple-dom, such as could only be created in a test tube by mad scientists. I for one do not hold with fruit eugenics. The kind of inbreeding that leads to perfect-looking apples is what also leads to mad emperors and royal simpletons. But that's okay. I would do what I always did: eat the fruits, and then set the seeds free in my valley, like tiny abominations escaped from the lab. And in seven years' time or so, their descendants would bear fruit, and I'd see what eccentricities emerged from their family trees.
I did not receive any gifts from the spider, but then, keeping up with social niceties was really the least of his problems these days.
Lately the spider seemed to be looking a little thin, a bit more ovalish than round, and I started to wonder how long a spider could go without any successes.
Hoping to give the spider a little encouragement, I opened one of the tiny cheese wheels and dropped a fly-sized chunk of cheese onto the web. But apparently cheese has some kind of anti-web properties, because the cheese tore right through. The torn part of the web dangled down in a wide funnel shape. It looked kind of like one of those line diagrams of a black hole. I was really worried the spider would step too close to the hole and get sucked into the infinite gravity, and maybe even go back in time. But apparently the spider figured this out and ran faster than the speed of light away from the spiderweb event horizon, to the relative safety of the toilet seat.