THE BIRTHDAY OF one of his friends fell on Christmas Eve; the friend received only one set of presents, some with cards saying “Happy Birthday” and some with cards saying “Merry Christmas.” His birthday came in summer, and his mother always gave a party for him, with cake, ice cream, favors, and dimes for the winners of games: picking up peanuts with one’s toes, crawling with a potato in the small of one’s back, pitching pennies into a floating dish. Because he chose games he was good at, every year he won over half the prizes. In two consecutive years his birthday fell on weekends, and his father attended the parties; his father doubled the prizes for the games and the second year told about a birthday party at which a man was struck by lightning while sitting at a kitchen window with a woman on his lap. The only other friend with a summer birthday also had parties, at which kissing games were played; the kissing, done privately in a bedroom, was an embarrassment for everyone. The summer he was thirteen he told his mother he didn’t want a party; his friends gave him no presents that year or thereafter, although on the morning of his fourteenth birthday he found on the back porch steps a gaily wrapped package of shit. He didn’t tell his parents about it, because it might worry them; nor his friends, because he thought the sender might be among them and reveal himself by mentioning it. This didn’t happen. Kissing games at birthday parties in the city were fun; at one party where the kissing was public a girl named Evelyn lifted a foot like a bird when she was kissed; he tried to see if she did it when he kissed her but couldn’t. She smelled good, and he asked her what perfume she used; she said none, which if true meant she was the only naturally sweet-smelling person he knew. He took her to a movie theater that had an elaborate stage show, which she liked and he didn’t, whereas he had liked the movie and she hadn’t; he was shocked to learn at the end of the evening that she was the older sister of the worst troublemaker in his grammar school, and he didn’t take her out again. When he was seventeen it happened that one of the boys in the neighborhood was having a nineteenth birthday and going into the army the following week. A large party was planned by the boy’s friends: the apartment of the married uncle of one of them was borrowed; large amounts of rye, gin, rum, and beer were bought, as well as cold cuts, bread, nuts, and potato chips; only girls with sexy reputations were invited, the purpose being to get the boy who was going into the army and anyone else laid. As far as he knew, no one was; but one of the boys sent a friend who was away and had missed the party an imaginary description, in which all the boys were laid, some three times by different girls. He was supposed to have “fucked Joyce and Judy with the same rubber, which broke in Judy.” The mother of the boy who received the letter found it, phoned the parents of everyone mentioned, and read the pertinent parts. His mother told him that she had received her call and that the woman was unbalanced. His twentieth birthday was spent traveling by train from one southern army camp to another. He celebrated his twenty-first at the Last Chance Café, an army-built replica of an Old West saloon, served by German prisoners of war, whom everyone kept frantically busy with unnecessary orders. When his children were growing up, what partying there was, was done for them; he and his wife celebrated their own birthdays with modest presents and a dinner out. One summer he and his family would have forgotten his birthday except for a telegram from a new friend, who made a point of remembering birthdays. He had his first novel published on his fortieth birthday for two reasons: Oliver Wendell Holmes had said that if you haven’t carved your name in the door by forty close up your penknife, and Ulysses had been published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. As a secret present to himself he invited his current mistress and her husband to the party. The young woman he fell in love with threw a strenuous party for his fiftieth birthday. All his oldest friends were there; a few had become mild drunks and eccentrics, and everyone except his children reminisced, which left the young woman feeling like a servant: she took it out on him later. His sixtieth birthday neither of his children will attend, the younger being three thousand miles away, the other pleading business in Philadelphia. As time goes on he will realize that his birthdays rather than accomplishments are looked on as postponements.