And when she gets the sensation, she go up in the air, come down in slow motion

Today is Jennie’s birthday. So that’s weird.

Today, like a lot of days before it, was always going to suck on some level. It sucks that she’s not here to celebrate it. On the other hand, how much celebrating would we likely have done. It probably would have been another day of either doctor’s appointments or recuperating from doctor’s appointments. And that would have sucked, too.

This day two years ago was when we found out her cancer was back and badder than ever, so I think that one still holds the title of Jennie’s Worst Birthday Ever. Around this time last year was when we brought Pippin home, which may not have been her Best Birthday Ever but was still pretty nice. So yeah. I think this year’s is probably Jennie’s Weirdest Birthday Ever, just by virtue of her not being here for it.

One of the weirdest things about Jennie being gone - and maybe I’ve talked about this before, I honestly don’t remember - is all of the things that we had that were just between us that are now just in my head. This isn’t exactly specific to our situation; I’m sure it’s true of anyone who’s in an important relationship that ends. Mostly it was inside jokes, or random movie or TV quotes that we would say to each other that always got a laugh (mostly from me) or a groan (mostly from her). I’ve thought about that stuff a lot, and how insignificant it felt at the time but how incredibly important it has felt over the past nine-plus months. I’ve told a few people about some of them, but there’s so much to tell.

A couple of things happened this week that have me thinking about one of those things, though, and I want to share it now. I’ll tell you why when the story is over.

The two things that happened this week that are pertinent to the story are Harry Belafonte dying, and Bed Bath & Beyond filing for bankruptcy.

Jennie was a big Harry Belafonte fan. She grew up listening to his records with her parents. Beetlejuice, a movie in which Belafonte’s music plays an iconic role, was one of Jennie’s favorite movies. If there was ever a character in which Jennie saw herself captured on-screen, it was Lydia Deetz.

So Jennie and I were at Bed Bath & Beyond one day. I honestly don’t remember why we were there. It wasn’t a place we frequented at all. We may very well have been registering for gifts for the wedding. Maybe buying new towels or pillows. Where will people go to do those things now that they’re closing? Is Linens ‘N Things still around? Oh wow, Google says they closed in 2008, where the hell have I been.

ANYWAY.

We were at Bed Bath & Beyond and we were in the checkout line. There were a lot of people ahead of us - was there a run on As Seen On TV items that day? - and we were standing in line talking about I don’t know what, and somehow Beetlejuice came up.

I had seen Beetlejuice maybe twice before I met Jennie. I have since seen it…many more times than that, but at the time I didn’t know it very well. Being a young white man, though, I was certain that I knew everything about it, and also about how storytelling in movies works - after all, I took one class on movies in college. I told Jennie that I thought it was fun that the song Lydia dances to at the end of the movie is the same song that Beetlejuice makes her parents and their dinner guests dance to earlier in the movie. I probably said something about how it tied the movie together nicely and was representative of how the same material can be used for different types of hauntings in the same house. Some bullshit like that.

Friends, this is patently wrong. The song in the earlier scene at the dinner party is “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”. The song Lydia dances to at the end of the movie is “Jump In the Line.” They are both by Harry Belafonte, but they are very different songs. Only a fool would think they were the same song. And that day, I was that fool.

Jennie looked at me appalled. “You’re joking, right? Those aren’t the same song.”

Me, an idiot: “I’m pretty sure it is, right?” Otherwise why would I have made such an astute observation about it.

We went back and forth on it a bit. Again, Jennie had grown up listening to Harry Belafonte records. This was the conversation where I learned that fact about her. And she had been watching Beetlejuice her whole life. She knew what she was talking about. Nevertheless, I stood firm.

And that was when the woman in line ahead of us chimed in.

To agree with me.

“You’re right, it is the same song in both scenes,” she said with a chipper smile.

Now normally, when strangers talk to me, I want no part of it. If a stranger talks to me in a store, I’ve been known to actively ignore them. Why are you talking to me? Did you think I was someone else? Hopefully my refusal to acknowledge your existence helps you realize the error of your ways.

But this time, I was thrilled to have a stranger talk to me. It was outside confirmation from an impartial party that I was right. I was so happy. I felt bad that Jennie was wrong, but what’re you gonna do.

Jennie fumed. As soon as the woman ahead of us went back to minding her own business, Jennie spat, “You’re wrong.” I laughed. “We’ll watch it when we get home and you’ll see,” she added.

We did watch it when we got home. Any excuse for Jennie to watch Beetlejuice. And of course she was right, and I felt like God’s Biggest Asshole.

If it had just been the two of us talking about it with each other, we probably would have forgotten all about it. But the lady in line in front of us chiming in to confirm my wrong belief made it something we never, ever forgot.

From then on, any time we heard a Harry Belafonte song, we would just look at each other, and Jennie would get mad all over again. “I want to find that lady,” she would say, “and make sure she knows how wrong she was.” I don’t know exactly what that would entail, and Jennie never elaborated. We didn’t have smartphones, which would have made the entire argument moot, during the initial discussion, so maybe all Jennie would do would be to pull up YouTube videos of the two scenes in question. That would’ve shut both me and any other random onlookers up pretty quickly.

I like this story, and what it became for us, for a few reasons. For one thing, I can always stand to be brought down a few pegs, so the thought of how confident I was in something that was just flatly wrong is pretty entertaining to me. But mostly, some of my favorite things about Jennie are on display in this story. Her enjoyment of things that I knew nothing about, and that she got to introduce me to. Her love of being right, and knowing that she’s right, and her refusal to back down even when outnumbered by idiots. And her ability to hold a grudge, albeit playfully, for years and years. (That last one might be my favorite, or at least one of the ones we had the most in common.)

I feel like I mope around in these posts a lot, and that’s not what I want this space to be. On her birthday, we should celebrate who Jennie was and is, and the fact that we got to have her in our lives, and that she’s still a part of them even when she’s not physically here. And this story is just one small example of the many, many, many things I have to be thankful for today

Another of those things is this. It’s a video I took in June of 2020, when we were both working at home because of the pandemic. I don’t know if Jennie even knew I took it. I was walking past her office towards mine and this is what I saw. I often wish that I’d taken more videos of Jennie, but I’m really grateful that, if I only got a limited number of videos of her, this is one of them.

RIP, Mr. Belafonte. And happy birthday, Jennie.