Memoir by Fran Cronin
Celebrating My 60th, Moskvich-Style
Russians love a good time, and if the fun is vodka fueled, all the better. I should know. I lived in Moscow for over four years, doing my best to assimilate into the culture.
By the time I left in 1998, my language skills were not perfect, but l was well on my way to mastering the fine art of drinking vodka shots off the crook of my elbow. I was old enough to know better, but when it comes to a good time, who says you can’t teach an old broad new tricks?
I, of course, learned more about Russians than our mutual love of vodka. I also learned about their quest for joy.
Snippets of splendor were sprinkled everywhere in Moscow. A potted green plant stood sentinel outside apartment doors, like a welcome sign. Inside, bright flower-print cloths were spread smooth on long tables laden with plates of food, cut crystal glassware, and a stockpile of soft drinks and hard liquor. In the evening, adored dogs, too large for the modest apartments where they lived, were promenaded through the dusty courtyards hidden behind tall apartment blocks. A ready piece of chocolate was tucked into the heavy folds of a wool coat for the chance encounter with a lucky child.
A dear Russian friend, Roman, loved birthdays more than anyone I’ve ever known. A thin, angular man, his face was a dry riverbed of lines from the cigarettes he smoked down to his fingertips. His toothy smile turned his wrinkles into deep chasms. On his birthday—or name day, to be culturally correct—he’d call and say “Let’s celebrate!” and insist the party was on him. We’d start at lunch and work our way through the late hours of the night, talking and eating and drinking. You had to feel alive to sustain a celebration like that.
No birthday was given a better reception than one marking a new decade. Turning 30, 40, or 50 wasn’t just a birthday. It was a jubilee.
So when I turned 60 earlier this year, I was determined to invoke my Moskvich spirit and celebrate. But in our youth-oriented culture, expressing joy on a birthday is a tough sell, especially when you get, as they say, “a little long in the tooth.”
If Hallmark was to be believed, only old broads celebrated their sixth jubilee: broads whose anatomy was surely sagging to the ground like some forgotten vestige of youth. Good times were a thing of the past. What deflating signals—especially when my image in the mirror left little doubt that my once-red hair was fading to gray. Telling crosshatches lined my neck. My life seemed to be teetering on the precipice of a perpetual senior moment.
I needed a game changer, fast. There was the unaffordable facelift, the more affordable Botox, or the economical purchase of turtlenecks.
I chose shoes. I bought a pair of high strutters my sister-in-law dubbed, “Fran’s Birthday Shoes.” Frankly, they were a bit challenging…and very risqué. Covered in leopard print, the shoes have a ramrod-straight heel four-inches high and a thick platform slab under the balls of my feet. If anything is hanging low, I’m too high from the ground to notice.
The weekend of my birthday was spent celebrating with friends in a swank (I’m showing my age) Boston hotel. We drank champagne in a balloon-filled room, dancing to Pandora Internet Radio and giggling like teenagers.
For dinner, we trudged up a brick-lined sidewalk on Beacon Hill. It was a tough hike even without the handicaps of our birthday footwear and multiple flutes of nose-tickling bubbles. So, like good Moskvich women, we donned our boots and marched up the hill, our tall party shoes stuffed deep into a tote.
The restaurant was a maze of small rooms and full-bodied aromas. We formed an unbroken chain around our circular table—we six women, one for each decade of my life. Amid the chatter, I raised my vodka martini and made the first toast: “To the next jubilee!” Standing tall in my elevated shoes, my spirits high, the decades seemed to float away.
Art Information
- “Cute Children’s Pink Russian Nesting Dolls” © D. Sharon Pruitt; Creative Commons license
- “Fran’s Birthday Shoes” © Fran Cronin; used by permission
Fran Cronin is a contributing editor and columnist at Talking Writing.
"When my hair started to gray at a somewhat respectable age, my dying mother—who finished all her sentences to me with “don’t ever tell anyone your age”—did not leave this earth until she said with her last breath, “And please dye your hair.”
— Eileen Fisher’s Got My Back
