My birthday is coming up. I don't have any plans, yet. I suppose I'll let June and some of my friends here take me out to dinner.
I suppose I could make plans myself, ask people to do something, but I don't really want to. For one thing, I'm feeling ambivalent; I generally like parties and so forth, but after having been away from campus for a while and on that damn bus for another three days, I want to rest, socially and spiritually, dig my roots down in the soil and escape to my spot in the woods.
But there's something else, too.
I joined Charlie for lunch the other day, just like when I was a novice. He let me sit with him without comment and I made no comment, either, for a while. Then I spoke.
"Charlie, what do you do on your birthday?"
He shrugged.
"Same thing I do every day, take a walk in the woods."
"Your birthday isn't special?"
He looked up at me. He was sitting on the steps of the Mansion porch, I was half-sitting on the stone railing around the porch.
"Every day is special," he said, "If I walk in the woods." He frowned, looked away, and grumped a bit. "I suppose I'll let friends take me to dinner or something." He sounded extremely unenthused.
"Well, I am your friend," I said, laughing a little, "so I'll give you the present of not asking you to dinner."
"Thank you kindly," he told me, with some grumpy sarcasm in his voice.
"Why am I so persistently drawn to misanthropes?" I asked after a bit. "There's you, there's Rick...My friends just don't like people." Actually, most of my friends do like people. Charlie and Rick are exceptions.
"I'm not going to attempt to explain your proclivities," Charlie told me. But then his expression changed somewhat. "Actually, people generally get me wrong."
"Oh?"
"You want me to tell you a secret, Daniel? I'm not really a misanthrope."
"Oh?"
"The real reason I've given up trying to organize my own birthday parties is I can't find anyone willing to pay enough attention to me. Fox and the grapes, I suppose."
And he returned to eating, evidently uninterested in further conversation.
You think you know someone.
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