My 40th birthday

It's tradition in my family to relentlessly torture each other prior to the milestone 40th birthday and follow it up with a surprise birthday party. When my oldest sister Teresa turned 40 about nine years ago, we took it to the limit. I'm not sure how it all came about, but we started anonymously sending her note cards each month on the sixth (her birthday is August 6) of each month counting down until she turned 40. We started this 18 months before her birthday. Overkill? Perhaps.

When Teresa's 40th birthday rolled around, it was on a Friday. For various reasons, we scheduled her surprise party for the following day. Boy was she surprised when she came home from getting a pedicure that Saturday and walked in the door with six gallons of milk to find 70 people standing in her house waiting to scream "happy birthday!" to her. At this point she still didn't know who was sending her the cards. They were never in our handwriting and they were always mailed from Ellinwood by my dad on the 5th of each month so she'd get it on the 6th. Teresa never mentioned the cards to us and we never mentioned them to her.

Her final note card contained a Polaroid picture of my mom, dad, sister Jenny and I. It really was the perfect execution of the torture. With it being the first one there was no precedent. Since then we've done similar but different things to the other sibs. Mark got little snippets about his life for a poster board before his surprise party. I can't remember at all what we did for John, other than have a party for him in my dad's welding shop in the dead of winter. For Jenny the memories are more vivid. We scanned 12 pictures of her at different stages of her life and we made posters out of them. Every month they showed up in weird places, like the convenience store where she goes to get her Diet Coke fix every day. During that year she was on the school board and I contacted the people at the school and arranged for one of these 8x11 posters to show up every pre-meeting packet but hers. She was definitely surprised at that meeting when they all had pictures of her.

Now that you have some background, you've probably figured out that my torture has begun. It started back in April. It was the night of the Final Four to be exact, the same week I turned 39. I was at my friend Joyce's for a KU basketball watch party and Laurie presented me with a gift bag. Inside was a cloth diaper and some rubber pants, but no note. Apparently the story of my life was going to be told through gifts that have some meaning in my life.

I was a little confused at first what the diaper and rubber pants really meant. I've been told since by my mom (even though I know exactly who's doing this, nobody's admitting to anything) that maybe it's because when I was a baby my sister Jenny was told to change my pants and she poked me with a diaper pin so hard that I ended up bleeding. Her punishment kept her from going to spend time in Salina with our cousins and she's never forgiven me for that. Because of course it was my fault.

My other gifts so far have included a ladies slip (yes, there's a story there but I'm not telling it right now), a letter from my invisible childhood playmates, a rooster refrigerator magnet and some super-cool sunglasses. When I was a teenager I got a pair of sunglasses that had one of those cling-on plastic sticker things that said "Duro lenses" and I thought it was the thing to do to leave that sticker on. My sisters teased me about it relentlessly until I finally removed the sticker in disgust. I didn't do it soon enough, however, because a new nickname was born. Any of you call me Duro, I'll deck you. That name is reserved for my sisters only. My latest gift was the sunglasses pictured here with some bling that spells out "DURO". These are much classier than the sunglasses of my youth. And believe me when I tell you that the letters aren't cheap cling-on material. They're glued on to stay.

When I was in Bozeman, Montana, earlier this year my cousin Angie presented me with a gift that she said came to her anonymously for me. Gee, I wonder how. It was a rooster refrigerator magnet. Yes, another story. I'm quite famous for this story in my family. My nephew Christopher wrote a paper about this incident for a class once in high school. I think he got an "A" on it. When I was little my family had lots of animals including pigs, chickens and a rooster named Pinky. We lived out in the country (where my parents still live) and I would frequently visit the pigs in their pen and then bop out to visit the chickens. Pinky didn't like me at all. And he was a mean rooster. More than once on my visits out to the chicken coop, he'd peck me on the behind. Most of the time it just scared me, but I guess more than once it caused me great distress and tears. He never really bothered anybody else. Let me just end by saying that Pinky's hatred for me caused his own demise. My dad got sick of him always pecking at me and he took the matter into his own hands. Pinky ended up on the menu in the pig pen one night.

Four years ago when Jenny moved into her house in Oakley, she found this sign left behind by the previous occupant. It was only natural that she give it to me.

So now you're up-to-date on the birthday shenanigans. I'll keep you posted as the rest of my "gifts" come rolling in.