"In accepting the Gift you Honor the Giver" - Stephen R. Donaldson

I have always been a "bad" birthday person. I drove everyone crazy because I really didn't want them to make any fuss at all. I just wanted to have a quiet normal day.

Maybe it was because of those silly ice cream shops that wanted to have a bunch of people you didn't know make a really loud racket with drums and singing and clapping and the whole place would stare at your utter embarrassment.

Whatever the cause, I don't care for my Birthday much. I just never felt it was particularly important or significant.

I first read the quote in the title of this post when I was about 13 years old in "Lord Foul's Bane" the first book in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson. If you think you like Anti-Hero's you'd better buckle up before tackling this excellent series. There were a lot of lessons for a 13 year old to come away with. Good People do Bad Things, and Bad People can do Good Things. The Good Guys don't always win in the end, and sometimes the cost of winning is unimagineably high. So I guess I can understand how I missed the significance of the simple line above. And I certainly wasn't wise or mature enough to be able to apply it to my own life at that point.

But a couple of years ago I sat down to reread the series and was struck by that quote. I realized that by being a pain in the butt to everyone who wanted to wish me a happy birthday, I was in effect dishonoring them.

My Birthday itself my not be very special to me, but my friends certainly are.