A Solemn End to Childhood Birthday Parties

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the 1982 Universal Pictures film, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg.

It was the last birthday party in the “kids’ party” tradition that I attended, though the birthday girl was almost grown, turning fifteen. She and I had just finished our freshman year at our high school where we belonged to a close friend group of cast-off’s from the more popular groups.

On that summer afternoon in 1982, my friends and I gathered in the kitchen of Wendy (not her real name), the birthday girl. It was to be a birthday party with elements of a child’s party and a teen party combined.

The teen part was that, after cake and presents, we would all go to our local shopping mall cineplex to see the new movie everyone was talking about. It was E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, poised to be the summer blockbuster of 1982, directed by Steven Spielberg, who basically invented the summer blockbuster in 1975 with his first major motion picture, Jaws.

Now, Spielberg had made a second movie about space aliens, four years after his first UFO movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which changed my life and made me want to be a film director. That hasn’t happened yet, but I digress….

The “kids’ party” element was the way the party began. It had been years since I walked into a friend’s kitchen and beheld a table topped with colorful paper plates and cups with identical childish designs. I don’t remember if the patterns were pictures of flowers or butterflies or unicorns, but it was something an eight-year-old girl would think is really cool.

But not one guest laughed or made a comment about the place settings. We all knew better, because of the year Wendy had been living through.

A few months before the school year ended, Wendy started showing up at our school lunch table about twenty minutes late once a week. We didn’t make comments about that either. We all knew better. Wendy was returning from her guidance office meeting with her peer grief support group. She had recently lost her mother to cancer.

So when we, Wendy’s party guests, aged fourteen to sixteen years old, filed into her kitchen for pizza and cake, we could only take it all in silently. Had Wendy set the table herself?

We quickly saw that she had not, as we looked at the slight embarrassment on her face. “My dad really got into this,” she remarked to the room.

I instantly forgot about how long I had waited to see “E.T.” so I could see it for the first time at this party. Suddenly, this party wasn’t about “E.T.” at all.

Wendy’s dad was from a different era than our own. He looked at least twenty years older than my parents and had several adult children whom I’d never met. He dressed in the slacks and dress shirt of an upper middle-class man from 1950s middle America.

This man, I am sure, had never been in charge of a birthday party for one of his children before. I’m sure that was his wife’s department.

But here he was, bringing in a cake that, in my memory, was homemade, or at least from a cake mix, but it may have been store-bought. It didn’t matter. He was serving it to us, on the table he decorated himself for his youngest daughter’s first birthday without her mother.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to the movie now. E.T. looked like a weird, ugly little alien in the TV commercials, and I assumed the story was about little kids, not mature teenagers like me. I wondered if anyone else there wanted to bag the movie too. (“Bag it” was a popular teen phrase back then.)

We actually had fun sitting around the table with our pizza and cake. I don’t remember the presents at all, not even what I got for Wendy. But I do remember the high school gossip and giggling leading to screaming laughter. Wendy’s dad had left the kitchen the minute after he brought out the cake.

The only time things got awkward was when one of the guests mentioned that “E.T.” might be kind of a sad movie to see on Wendy’s birthday.

“E.T. dies in it, you know.”

“Shhh! Some of us…”

“Yeah, but then he comes back to life.”

“OH MY GOD! SOME OF US HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET!”

I wasn’t the one who yelled about the spoilers. I wasn’t even angry. The movie was fiction. It was a fairy tale, or really, as I learned after seeing the movie, a Lassie movie, but with an alien instead of a dog. Sorry, Mr. Spielberg, but I like a lot of your other films much more than "E.T.".

Sweet sixteen parties weren’t a big thing with my friends. I don’t think any of us had one or went to one. I didn’t know it at the time, but Wendy’s little kitchen party and movie outing was the last birthday party I would attend with my peers until college, and those were mostly excuses to drink wine coolers on the sly.

Wendy’s party was a meaningful “kids’ birthday party” to end my childhood with. It was as much about Wendy’s mother’s passing as it was about Wendy’s birth. To me, it was mostly about her father navigating it all with caring and grace. The party represented the whole of life, with its joy, sadness, and courage to keep going in one strange, awkward afternoon.

No wonder the flying bicycles didn’t impress me.

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This story was originally published on Medium.com.