My 36th Birthday

Tuesday was my 36th birthday. As I have for the past four years, I took off work on that special day to have some time to myself. Before I could start the clock for "Peggy's time," though, I had to take care of a number of tasks. These included getting my son ready for pre-school, then dropping him off; making an appointment for a parent-teacher conference Wednesday afternoon; picking up dry cleaning; going to the grocery store; revising a welcome letter for new members in an Internet-based women's group (Ladies-of-the-Heart); checking my e-mail; cleaning away the breakfast dishes; and picking up a few toys around the house.

I'm sure I could have continued running errands and doing housework indefinitely, but somehow I managed to remember that it was my birthday, and that I wanted to spend that day doing something for myself for a change. Around 10:30 I finally jumped in the car and drove to the Franconia-Springfield Metro station. I take this route four times a week to work, and it was very hard not to drop into a commuter's trance and ride until my usual stop. Fortunately, I was able to keep my mind clear enough to get off at my intended destination: King Street/Old Town Alexandria.

Throughout the years, I have occasionally gone to specific locations in Old Town Alexandria, but I have only once wandered at my leisure up and down King Street, dropping into any place that caught my fancy. King Street not only has all kinds of restaurants and stores, but it also has a theatre, an art gallery, and boat rides. Tuesday morning I had the idea that I would shop for a lightweight jacket and a piece of jewelry to commemorate the day, then find a seafood restaurant as close to the waterfront as possible for lunch.

After window-shopping for a while, I ended up at Ten Thousand Villages, a store that buys goods from developing communities all over the world at "fair trade." "Fair trade" means the local artisan receives a fair market price for his/her work rather than whatever the buyer feels like paying. I enjoy shopping at Ten Thousand Villages because they have a lot of interesting things from all over the world -- jewelry, clothing, children's toys, musical instruments, furniture, stationery, and other hand-made items -- and I feel that my money is doing "double duty" when I shop there because of their "fair trade" purchasing policy. I buy things that I would normally buy from a department store, but by shopping at Ten Thousand Villages I know a significant percentage of my money goes to local artisans in disadvantaged communities rather than a corporation. It's like buying cards from UNICEF or shopping from The Hunger Site and its related charities rather than a department store; your money helps people in need at the same time that it enables you to purchase lovely things.

I did buy a few things for myself -- a silver neckwire, a purple-blue-orange batik dress made in Indonesia, and a sturdy shopping basket from Bangladesh -- but I also ended up buying a lot of accessories for my goddaughters Megan and Jessica, a toy for my godson Adam, and other objects that looked like they would make good gifts for as-yet-unknown recipients in the future. Even though these few hours were supposed to be for me alone, my split-shift mother's habit of multitasking kicked in, and I found myself shopping for others at the same time. I also ended up giving a brief interview to a Washington Post reporter who was doing a feature article on the store.

I had lunch at a seafood restaurant, then went home, where things started getting busy again. I put away my purchases and greeted my son and my mother, who had picked up my son from pre-school at lunchtime and had been taking care of him during my birthday outing. About an hour later my husband came home, and the four of us went to a notary public to sign some papers related to an upcoming trip. After dropping off my mother back home, my husband, son and I went to the Perinatal Memorial Garden at Fairfax Hospital to spend some time thinking about the triplets we had lost exactly five years earlier. Finally, we had dinner at a restaurant near the hospital and came home for birthday cake and gifts. While my husband put our son to bed, watched a little TV, then went to bed himself, I cleared away the dessert dishes, picked up some stray toys, then got on the computer to muse about my day.