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.
