A Moving Celebration

Julie Denny, Birthday Lady

The national slowdown demanded by the medical situation is fraying a few nerves around here like everywhere else, but what I am mainly impressed by is the imagination and good cheer on display among so many imaginative and cheerful friends.  One of these people is a splendid lady named Julie Denny, with whom our friendship dates back about five decades.  It was through church that we first met her and her late husband, Harry Clark, a brilliant macro-Mensch who had done graduate work on Dickens before taking up a creative career in advertising.  They had two delightful boys—Toby and Gregor--real originals who, so far as I could tell, didn’t march to anybody’s drummer.  But how could I predict they would one day launch a birthday party start-up?

There followed a period, which my faulty memory cannot precisely date, during which our friendship was put into a kind of cold storage.  First this family moved away from Princeton to build a dream house somewhere in New York State near the Connecticut line, so that we were only in Christmas card touch for several years.  (Bad news for us.)  But then Harry and Julie returned to Princeton, and we picked up our friendship as though there had been no decade-long hiatus.  (Good news for us.)   But we are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, and very sadly Harry died, far too young.  All of us who knew them grieved, but also marveled at the courage and resilience with which Julie absorbed the blow, determinedly carrying on with her skillful professional work as a counselor/mediator while  expanding her volunteer work with worthy social and cultural organizations in our area.  Among many other valuable skills, she has a rare genius for friendship and a flair for cooking, often joined together in delightful dinner parties of which we have been the beneficiaries.

Of course, the years do go by, and it so happens that just last week a highly significant birthday rolled around for Julie Denny.  For the largely youthful readership of this blog such an event and its spiritual freighting can hardly be imagined, though well captured in a New Yorker cartoon I once saw.  Two grumpy geezers are sitting in stuffed chairs at their club, and one says to the other: “You know, eighty is not the new anything.”  Alas, too true, yet its arrival absolutely demanded festivities which, at first glance, seemed absolutely prohibited by social responsibility; and if any single concept defines the Julie Denny Circle, it’s Social Responsibility.  The dilemma must have seemed particularly acute to the aforementioned boys and their families.  High Noon.  Gary Cooper.  Whether to choose twixt love or duty?

Well, it turns out that the boys are no longer around.  While I was busy with the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, they were approaching the Middle Age from a different point of view.  They are highly competent professionals who share the manifestly heritable impishness, wit, dramatic flair, and inventiveness characteristic of the Clark-Denny ménage of my own comparative youth.  Gregor, abetted by his brother Toby, came up with a brilliant idea.  They couldn’t organize a birthday dinner for their mother, so they organized a parade!  This required the email collusion of several of Julie’s friends.  The idea was that at four in the afternoon of her birthday an automobile convoy of such people would drive by her house with posters, banners, flags, noise-makers, and any other appropriate accoutrements we could think of.  I thought of camels and elephants, but it turned out that the Philadelphia Zoo is ruled by the same uptight social distancing requirements as we are.  So cars it must be.

The ideal place for this convoy to bivouac was a nearby elementary school with a broad circular drive designed to make it easier for parents to drop off students or pick them up.   Better yet was its suitability for mustering a parade of automobiles.  Even had the event not fallen on a Sunday, as it did, the place would have been deserted by gubernatorial decree.  By the time we got there to take our places in the formation there were at least a dozen vehicles ahead of us.  According to a report we got later from somebody or another, the caravan when fully formed had more than forty cars.

 

The convoy forms....                                       

             ...and passes in review

 

We snaked through a few quiet blocks of tidy suburban houses, astonishing some masked strollers, who well may not have seen another car in motion all day, to the celebrity’s house.  By I know not what ruse she had been lured to her front lawn just as the first cars arrived.  Fortunately for posterity one of her good friends who is a videographer had also appeared.  Gregor’s concept proved brilliant.  Progress was slow but steady, intermittent rather in the fashion of a traffic stream going through an Easy Pass reader.  Drivers and their passengers shouted their safely distanced greetings through opened car windows.  Now and again a car would stop and someone would quickly deposit a safely distanced gift in its fumigated packaging on the front lawn.  Bells rang, scarves waved; I think I heard some singing.  Julie appeared to be pixilated.  And thus the convoy went around twice without anybody rear-ending anybody else

This event happened last Sunday afternoon.  Sunday afternoon is usually about the time I start trying to dream up a blog topic for Wednesday.  Of course, recognizing plausible topics is not identical to writing essays.  The actual writing is usually a Tuesday night sort of thing.  My role-model here is the great Doctor Johnson who never even began to write his periodical essays until the boy from the printer’s shop was at his door clamoring for copy.  But there conceivably could be some people who might not consider their personal birthday party, however artistically conceived and executed, the proper object of a public retrospective.  So on Monday I ran the idea by the birthday lady herself.  I gained her gracious permission to proceed, so long as I could guarantee that the piece would not go, well, viral.  Among the few promises I can conscientiously make about this blog, fortunately,  is its continuing obscurity.  In the course of our conversation I did drop the hint that I could use some photographs, if she happened to know of any, which led to an embarrassment of riches that I cannot adequately acknowledge.*

As I am dependent entirely upon photographic evidence I can give no full account of the tributes presented to this worthy woman.  Hiram, King Solomon’s admiral, every three years brought to his sovereign from Tarsus a shipload of “gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”  I presume Julie will have received her well-deserved share of such good things, but I am certain that she scored at least one gift more precious yet.  You can consult my recent essay “The Tissue Issue”.

*I am grateful for photographic help from Gregor Clark, Eliot Daley, Elyse Pivnick, Anne Seltzer, Marna Seltzer, and probably others whose names are known only to God.