My birthday was 10 days ago, and if you were also born in the middle of summer, you will keenly understand what I have to say next: As a school-aged child, summer birthdays stunk. There were no cupcakes for the class, no groups singing “Happy Birthday,” and no birthday parties thanks to your friends’ inconsiderate vacation schedules.

I suffered an added slight: My grandmother Doris. Doris insisted calling me on my birthday, every birthday, at the exact time of my birth. This would have been dandy if I had been born between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., but no — I arrived in the world at 7:11 a.m. So every birthday, in the middle of summer, with no one around to celebrate, my mother would wake me, hiss be nice, and direct me to the telephone so that I could hear my grandmother sing. (That is how we do it in my family: No greeting, just straight into the song.) Doris did this faithfully every year until I was in law school, and then one year she didn’t. That July 16th, I rolled onto my side and squinted at the alarm clock and saw that it was well past 7:11 a.m. I am pretty sure then that I was grateful (and unaware of the dementia diagnosis that soon followed). And I am absolutely positive now that I would give almost anything to be awakened by a call at 7:11 a.m. just once more time by Doris.

The backlash now is that I celebrate my birthday with the fervor of an 8 year-old born smack dab in the middle of, say, February.  Last year, I got free ice cream at Chick-Fil-A and free dessert at a French restaurant — both made possible, I might add, by announcing to the world that it was my birthday. Chris and the kids know that the first thing to say — or sing, for that is acceptable too — to me on July 16 is happy birthday, and when caller ID announces that a family member is calling, I answer the phone “Birthday Girl.” It is bonkers. Or perhaps, more accurately, I am bonkers.

This year marked my very first 49th birthday, and a July 16 spent in the car. Chris and I had planned to celebrate with a fancy dinner out on the evening of July 15, but two hours before the reservation time, I realized that my idea of a perfect evening consisted of pajamas, pizza, beer, and a screening of Bridget Jones’ Diary. There is a scene where Bridge celebrates her own birthday surrounded by friends, blue soup, and the adorable but insufferable barrister Mark Darcy, and a toast commences: “To Bridget, who cannot cook, but who we love . . . just as she is.” With Michelob Ultra in hand, I joined the toast, for it is a perfect one, and the next morning, I woke around 7:11 a.m. to find handmade cards from Chris and our daughter waiting exactly where I eat breakfast every morning. And they were perfect, too.

As I mentioned, I spent seven hours of valuable birthday time in the car. It was Chris’ family’s annual beach vacation. For at least 70 years, his father has gone to Emerald Isle, North Carolina, and Chris grew up going, too. I joined the vacation about 30 years ago, a fact that was lost on me until this trip up. I have to confess that this trip has not been my favorite over the years. To put it delicately, it is hard to have 15 people in the same house for an entire week; it often smacks of a bizarre sociological experiment. To put it bluntly, I haven’t exactly helped, and in past years I have done a considerable amount of complaining and fuming. It hit me a few years ago that that needed to stop for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that life was simply too short to act like a horrible ingrate even while on vacation.

It helped when the family greeted me on my birthday with an ice cream cake. This one, from Ben & Jerry’s, dispensed with the misguided fiction that an ice cream cake needs to contain cake: It instead contained equally delicious layers of chocolate fudge brownie and salted caramel, best served slightly melted and in an immodestly sized portion. (By the way, my middle aged weight continues to puzzle me.) My in-laws gave me a French easel — a wooden contraption perfect for plein air painting and complete with a drawer for paints —  that will almost certainly necessitate my wearing a beret. Flooded with a sugar high and contemplating many happy hours of landscape painting, I smiled at the extended family and thought, What do I need to do to remain kind and keep my big mouth shut?, for that would almost certainly become an issue during the week. To advance that ball, there was, of course, leftover birthday cake and walks on the beach. And then there was exercise — preferably, exercise that took me out of the house and into the world.

I am unsure how I missed the recreation center on past visits. It is a squat building tucked behind the police station (which, to be fair, I have never visited) and under the water tower on a tiny street called LEISURE LANE, and what it lacked in curb appeal, it made up for in rock-bottom pricing. Non-members paid $5 per class. Members paid $1. (The center was both serious about collecting payment — plastering signs everywhere that there were absolutely no exceptions to the payment rule, whether for age, elected official status, or lack of enjoyment of the class — and also oddly sanguine about payment, employing an honor system of tossing class payments into a coffee can.)

Google Maps toyed with me, and I shot way past Leisure Lane on my first visit. I resorted to the time-honored Convenience Store Clerk Maps, found my way, and walked into my first class — Dance Fusion — five minutes late. I was immediately struck by two things. First, the teacher was not a dancer herself. She was an aerobics instructor, and everything seemed a little frenetic and made up as she went along, although not in a bad way. Second, except for the instructor, I was the youngest person there. By two decades.

I have written before about exercise: It is just something I do, like brushing my teeth. I don’t waste a whole lot of time on the why, but despite not asking the question, the Dance Fusion class offered an answer. I exercise so that 20 years from now, I can sing along with and dance to the 2037 equivalent of Flo-Rida’s “Low.”

Yes, there I was singing along with the septuagenarians and octogenarians, Shawty had them apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, the whole club was lookin’ at her. And the aerobics instructor would shout Shake it and get down! Now mambaI Back it up! Hands up and raise the roof! And we all did.

I am not sure that I have had more fun in a class than I had with the good women and men of Dance Fusion that morning. A number of them hugged me after class, and the oldest woman in class told me that I danced beautifully. I told her — and I meant it — that she had me beat by a long shot.

For the rest of the week, I reported to the rec center, dropped my money into the coffee can, and took classes, mostly yoga and Pilates, with my new friends. In a yoga class, we stood in a circle, palms pressed together to steady one another in tree pose, and the woman to my left squeezed my hand. Stay here, she said, and keep exercising with us. I told her, laughing, that it would be too long of a commute.

Back at the house, I knitted and read and walked on the beach and painted on the porch. The happiest times were when my daughter painted next to me, bumping into me and sharing my brushes and mostly working in silence. It was during one of these reveries that we got called into dinner, the noisy crowd shoving around the table and jockeying for food.

My father-in-law has a bad habit of forsaking utensils and rifling through a platter of food with his bare hands, to the point that my mother-in-law told him that he had to take a particular sausage since he had touched it. Holding the sausage in his hand for emphasis, he said loudly that those very hands had changed enough dirty diapers through the years to give him the right to touch everyone’s food.

I was not particularly thrilled to have those two things linked, I must confess. (You will have to admit that there were better ways to express that sentiment.) But it was a statement backed by years of service and devotion to his family, of loading small children into a car and making a daunting drive, of inviting the sulking college girlfriend of his son to join the trip, of insisting that the adult children bring their children every single year, of gathering the family together under one roof, bizarre sociological experiment and all.

Because we have been traveling lately, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts. One of those podcasts talked about a series of commercials that I have never seen, one of which asks people to write down everything that they believe will happen in the next five to 10 years. The respondents overwhelmingly wrote down only good things. But there came a reminder that the past five to 10 years carried heartbreaks, too, and that the coming five to 10 years would continue the trend of the good and the bad. Disappointment if you’re lucky. Outright despair if you are not.

There is no certainty that in five to 10 years we will still be loading into the car and heading to that beach trip or that everyone sitting around the table would be there happy and well. After years of dreading the trip, I thought of how I would miss it, how a large chapter of my life would come to an end, and how I had better enjoy the moment right now. So with my fork, I speared a sausage — probably one that my father-in-law had touched, for he had touched a lot before my mother-in-law intervened — and I ate my fill of the feast set before me.

After all, there was dance class the next morning, and I had to be ready to back it up and get down.

ALC