I was born to a mother who decided to place me for adoption but who feared she would not if she once looked at me. That may be why I like to be fussed over on my birthday.
I don’t need big parties. I would rather be taken out for as many meals as possible by one or two friends at a time. And I don’t need presents to unwrap. I have enough stuff.
But especially on milestone birthdays, I want some attention, and I want to do something out of the ordinary. For my 60th birthday, I decided to measure this big, round number in relationships and words. I picked 60 people important to me. (I cheated a little—some of my 60 were couples or families.) Giving them six months’ notice, I asked each to write me exactly 60 words. I promised to write each of them 60 in turn.
No surprise that the 60 people I chose are a mirror of who I am. It turns out that 20, including my own two children, are other adoptees. Ten more are other adoptive parents, or birthparents of someone they placed for adoption, or adoption professionals. I have met most of them in our work to make adoption more open, better able to give children new parents without stripping them of their origins.
Ten of my 60 are writers. (I’m a poet.) Three-quarters are female, ranging in age from late 80s down to my 4-year-old granddaughter, Emily. Her Grandpa Burt, my first husband, died a week after telling me what he was planning to say in his 60 words. I redid my words about him to include what he’d told me.
Only 13 of the 60 came into my life in my first 30 years, three of these at Stanford. More than a third arrived in my 50s. No wonder that was such a good decade.
So many approaches to my request. One couple came up with 60 words that could be spelled by the letters in my name. My high school boyfriend described a fantasy dinner he would make for the two of us and our parents (all now deceased). My son wrote six very honest statements of 10 words each. My daughter, her husband and their children took turns adding words to their list. It is all in my daughter’s handwriting, but I can tell exactly who added each word.
One friend sent conceptual art. There were 60 little Melba toasts, each with a one-word “toast” pasted onto it. A friend who likes to break rules wrote 200 words but highlighted 60. Another wrote a series of six poems, one of which contained the called-for number of words. Two Harvard graduates who don’t know each other wrote the goofiest rhymes. Is a Harvard diploma a kind of poetic license?
What people sent me was arranged in two scrapbooks in the order in which the contributions arrived. But I arranged what I had written about my others in the order in which people came into my life. Voilà! I had a kind of autobiography. I’m not sure any other 3,600 words would tell more about me.
A few weeks after my birthday, I heard seven words that were what I had really wanted to convey to my 60-plus loved ones. At the end of a transatlantic phone chat with my friend Anna Miliotti of Prato, Italy, she called out, “I love you; you’re part of me!” That’s exuberant Anna and a literal translation of idiomatic Italian. But that’s what I want all those who count in my life to know: I love you; you’re part of me.
PENNY CALLAN PARTRIDGE, ’66, is a poet living in Amherst, Mass. Her next book, Where My Poems Have Taken Me, will pair poems and essays.
