When I was in New Jersey recently I had the opportunity to take three of my great-nephews to their local comic-book store. I took some cash out of an ATM because I wanted to buy each of them something, and figured I’d spend about 10 dollars each.

All three of them were excited to be there (as was I, of course). The middle brother (aged 11, I believe) scored eight comics he wanted out of the dollar box; he was especially glad to learn about “Damage Control,” because he’d always wondered who cleaned up the messes left by superheroic battles, and to pick up an entire run of the miniseries for cheap was glorious. The youngest, who turned nine just this week, was interested in a lot of the things in the store, but decided he didn’t actually want anything. (I know:  remarkable wisdom in one so young. One of the things I want most at this point of my life is to be rid of some of the things I own, because it’s feeling like they own me. But it’s taken me decades of adulthood to realize this.) The eldest brother selected a small Transformer in a locked display case, and then said to me something I’ve been thinking about ever since:  “We can say it’s my birthday present.”

I wouldn’t have said that, because I hadn’t known it was going to be his birthday a few days hence. And understandably so:  I see these boys once, or sometimes twice, a year. And I don’t think I’ve ever been there for the birthday of any of them. We’ve got a large extended family — my mother; my brother and his wife and their daughter and their son and their daughter-in-law; my other brother and his husband; my sister and her husband, and their daughter and her husband and their three children, and their son and his girlfriend and their son, and their daughter and her husband and their three children; plus myself and my wife and our three children. That’s 28 of us. This leaves out all the various aunts and uncles and cousins and so forth. Who could possibly remember all these birthdays? My policy is to send children random gifts when least expected, for maximum impact.

So when my great-nephew said, “We can say it’s my birthday present,” well… I hadn’t intended to get him one. But he assumed he was due one. And then I remembered what childhood was like. Childhood is that period of your life when you believe that people owe you something. I certainly felt that way at his age. When I was his age, I spent a month away from my parents staying with relatives in another state, and during that month my birthday came around. I got a card in the mail from my mother with some money in it — but I nevertheless fully expected a full-on birthday party upon my return weeks after the date. Forty years later, it takes no effort at all to conjure the shock I felt at no birthday party at all. I lurked around for two full weeks expecting at any moment for my family to jump out and yell “surprise!” and confront me with a full-tilt birthday party, with streamers and hats and balloons and a mountain of gifts — except I wouldn’t be surprised, because I knew, I just knew, all along that surely such an event would be coming any day now, there was no fooling me. Except it didn’t.

Which leads us to the pain of adulthood:  the slow dawning that no one owes you anything, that, indeed, if you are to get anything in adulthood, you need to get it on your own. Heirs and princesses and landed lords and movie stars and billionaires born with the name Trump don’t need to learn this lesson, but just about everyone else does.

When we got back to my mother’s house from our comic-book-store spree, I saw that the Chinese food my brother had ordered for dinner with our mother had arrived. As I sat down to eat, I fished out a twenty-dollar bill to give to him. “No, that’s okay. It wasn’t much,” he said. “Besides, you bought at the comic-book store.” Spoken like a true adult.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2015 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.