The best birthday Emery Copeland ever had was a couple of years ago. He celebrated with one friend, two beautiful women and an incredibly huge amount of crack cocaine that kept the party going for approximately two weeks.
Wait.
Let him rephrase that from the perspective of six months clean, and in light of the fact that he was sitting in the Miami Rescue Mission dining hall during a mass birthday party the Mission was throwing there and in its two Broward locations for homeless people and recovering addicts like him on the theory that their actual birthdays might otherwise pass uncelebrated.
``It was the best one but the worst one, know what I'm saying?''
For presents there were goodie bags of deodorant, soap, toothpaste and the like. There was chicken and beans and rice to go around, and fruit punch in cans and two giant cakes, and little stickers everybody wore that said I celebrated my birthday at the Miami Rescue Mission.
The sentiment was much appreciated and it was all decent stuff but hygiene products do not, objectively speaking, make great presents. Mission management knows this, and knows also that life is no party. ''If you're on the street you don't want something somebody's going to steal,'' said Marilyn Brummitt, director of community development. ``This is useful.''
And even with decorations and music and cake, a mission doesn't make a great birthday party spot.
A couple great birthday party spots: for Kojo Mfumi, it'd be home in Ghana. ''I had my parents and everyone was around me, my family.'' For Cedric Jones it might just be prison, where his friends threw him a to-do with soda and soup. It was all they could scrounge but it was enough: ``Just the thought of that.''
And an example of a great present -- truly great, great enough to provide lasting joy and prick the envy of neighbors -- would be the blue Schwinn 10-speed bike Johnny Pearson got from his grandmother on his 11th birthday.
Or the surprise birthday party his sister threw him recently, when he had three years clean and before he started the coke again. He saw high school friends he'd missed for 35 years that night. The party was a present in itself, and those few hours sitting eating hotdogs with his friends out in the yard were some of the happiest of his life. They made him glad he was been born that day, or any day.
If you have a story idea, e-mail nspangler@MiamiHerald.com
