OTHER PEOPLE'S BIRTHDAYS / / / HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

To celebrate the birthday of an old master of fairy tales, I had grand visions of a party involving castles and crowns.  But my impatience for the arrival of flowers and greenery got the better of me, and Hans Christian Andersen's birthday became also a celebration of a spring long-awaited.  I set a table garlanded with dozens of paper flowers and baked a carrot cake.

For someone born just over two hundred years ago, here is a man who wasted no time settling into the collective consciousness of every generation that followed him.  Many years ago, when the ledge in our family room was used as a puppet-show theater, my sister and I spent long hours preparing for a production of The Emperor's New Clothes that was widely praised by our audience of three.  His stories were just the sort that most appealed to my childhood sensibilities - stories of kings and queens and princesses and a pitiably ugly duckling.  And it is fitting that although he adapted versions of folk tales that had long histories, the most famous of his works are the stories that he invented himself.

What kind of a man must he have been to have imagined an emperor so proud he would not admit that he had been swindled, a tin soldier madly in love with a paper doll, and a mermaid who wished to be human?  He called himself an ugly duckling, but time and fondness of memory have made him a swan.  

Happy birthday, Mr. Andersen.  You have achieved the immortality of storytellers - your stories live on.