But I Want a Puppy!

My fifth birthday party. The gold standard for all future birthdays.

Chapter 21

My fifth birthday was outstanding.

For starters, my parents had a party for me—my first—and invited all the neighborhood kids. At the drugstore we bought invitations that had cowboys and horses on them, and I watched with jubilation and anticipation as my mom wrote down the details of the party on the preprinted lines on the inside of the cards. The best part was seeing my name, handwritten by my mom, so it read:

“It’s a Birthday Party for Jimmy!”

I was turning five. I was about to start kindergarten. And my time had arrived.

To further add to my excitement, my mom took me to our local department store to buy me new clothes to wear to the party!

New clothes! I hardly ever got new clothes!

And I was sure I looked just like the boys in the Sears catalog once I put on my new red shorts and seersucker shirt.

During the week before the party, I planned games and activities with my mom. We went shopping for prizes. We ordered a cake at the Vienna Bakery. It was going to have my name on it. MINE!

I was on “center-of-attention” overload. (Adding to the list of reasons my brothers didn’t like me.)

So, enjoying the spotlight I rarely had, I decided to do what any almost-five-year-old would do. I asked for a puppy as my birthday present.

I figured, “Why not?” We used to have a dog. From my self-centered point of view, it seemed like the perfect time for my parents to give me a puppy.

My mom ignored my request. I decided she was acting. But I knew she had something planned. I knew there would be a puppy in this story!

The day of my party was a warm, sunny, perfect August day. I woke up at the crack of dawn and immediately put on my new clothes four hours before the party began.

My mom was up and had already set our family table for the party. It had a white plastic tablecloth on it (we never had tablecloths!) with cups and plates that had the same cowboy and horses that adorned my invitations. The cake in the middle of the table was round and said “Happy Birthday Jimmy,” which was very cool. What wasn’t cool was all of the big frilly flowers on the top of the cake. Flowers? This was a cowboy party. Where were the horses?

But that aside, the BEST part of the table was that my mom covered it with M&Ms. Everywhere. Hundreds if not millions of M&Ms were spread out all over the table. And she said we could eat ALL of them at the party.

Five-year-old heaven.

My friends arrived at eleven o’clock, and we proceeded to play all of the backyard games my mom and I had planned. My brother Mick even helped out. And he was nice!

My mom had us come inside to eat and open gifts. I don’t recall what we actually had to eat, because as soon as I sat down, I spilled an entire paper cup of red Kool-Aid all over the table and myself—soaking my clothes to the skin. And ruining a couple of hundred M&Ms.

So, I had to make an unplanned departure from my own party and put on a pair of torn, old blue jeans and a T-shirt. I was longer to be mistaken for one of the boys in the Sears catalog.

But I did get a lot of gifts, so I quickly forgot my table disaster. My buddy Kirk gave me a cash register that looked just like a real one in the stores. And Kristin gave me a gun set I was sure would be good for using on my brothers.

And, while all of us were enjoying the sugar high from too much cake and the salvaged M&Ms, I was perfectly aware there was still one more gift awaiting me somewhere in the house.

A puppy. My puppy.

Would I get it when all of my friends were there?

Would I get it later that day when my dad got home from work?

Or would it be hidden up in my bedroom in one of those big boxes with holes cut in the sides so I could take it to bed with me and hug it all night?

Of course, in the end, there was no puppy.

There was the party with the cool invitations.

There were the fun games with a brother who even helped.

There were new clothes.

A cake with roses (yuck) and my name on it.

There were M&Ms.

And there were gifts galore.

It was a great birthday. But I was still kind of sad.

Because there was no puppy.

Fast-forward one year: The puppy arrived the day before my sixth birthday. I had long stopped asking for one. But that summer day one year later, my parents piled all five of us into the car and drove to Omaha to pick out a puppy at a small, rundown pet store.

We chose a ten-week-old mutt and named her Trixie.

She arrived in our family on that uneventful August day. And she enjoyed the enviable role of “Super Dog” in our house for thirteen long years.

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It was august, my birthday month. Almost three months after surgery. By all accounts, it should have been the best birthday of my life.

I was nearing the end of a summer of healing. My doctor gave me the green light to go back to work whenever I wanted to. The truth was I didn’t want to.

My cancer remained an unresolved issue, and I was learning to live life with a new regime of daily medications to keep the dormant cancer cells I likely still had in my body at bay.

“We’ll keep watching for it, and we’ll check you every three months so we can be on top of it when it comes back,” my doctor told me.

Grateful? Of course. Frustrated? Yup.

But I was equally frustrated that the issue of my “gift” was also unresolved. I never found it. This extraordinary thing Karen promised hadn’t arrived. I looked so hard I practically willed it to happen. So, while I had an amazing summer of reflection, nothing—my health or my gift—ended the way I had originally dreamed.

There were so many things I had cherished over the three months of recuperating. Let me rephrase that. I cherished my three months of recuperating. I felt alive every day and I was afraid to go back to a world where that feeling would stop.

And now it was time to look at my calendar to figure out a day to resume work.

My time was running out.

I wondered if maybe I actually did find the gift but just hadn’t figured it out. I could certainly tell people about all the things I had experienced that summer. I had learned the importance of slowing down and celebrating the people in my life, and the importance of being more honest and loving with people. I could say I had learned to see my children’s gifts or I needed to look hard at my professional career and do some serious soul searching regarding my commitment to it. I could say all of that. And it would be true.

But what wouldn’t be true would be to say I had that super-amazing “Aha!” moment.

And I was coming to terms with the likelihood of being disappointed. Quietly and silently..