At the start of each year, Mom sits in front of her new wall calendar and begins to write down all the prominent family birthdays for the next year.

She is the only one who does that, and the only one never to forget a birthday.

Modern technology — far removed from the pen-and-ink-covered wall calendar — has transformed birthdays forever. The social networking site Facebook will list prominently everyone whose birthdays are on a certain day. I’ve never received so many birthday wishes than last year on June 21.

Friends from college and high school, many of whom I have not seen in decades, are true to Facebook protocol and drop some happy birthdays and a few hoppy birthdays from those who know my like for the suds.

On Thursday morning, the 17th straight celebration of my 21st birthday, the phone rang at 6. It was Mom — of course — the first to give her greetings.

“You know, your birthday is not listed on Facebook. I don’t want you to not get any birthday wishes and feel left out,” she said.

Indeed. A privacy inspection showed that I did not input my birthday. With the exception of Mom and brother Dan, no one had wished me a happy birthday. Certainly all these friends of mine have to know when my birthday is, right?

Seconds after adjusting my settings to show that June 21 is actually the day I came into this world in 1974, I received a birthday wish from a guy who was in the same high school French class as I more than 20 years ago. If memory serves, he and I were routinely removed from class for incessant clowning. But he and I haven’t talked since Bush the elder was in office.

The deluge continued. College acquaintances, drinking buddies from yesteryear, a teacher I once sprayed with a water gun and a reporter for a South Mississippi newspaper clogged my Facebook page with heartfelt birthday wishes. It made me feel so special, so popular. Everyone remembered.

As an experiment, I then re-removed my birthday from the Facebook settings page. The birthday wishes stopped coming.

Facebook has made wishing happy birthdays an obligatory act that takes almost as much thought as it does time to type a greeting.

Yes, it was nice to hear from my old French class cronies, but nothing ever will compare to a 6 a.m. phone call from someone who prefers an ink pen and wall calendar to Facebook. That makes for a truly happy birthday.

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Sean P. Murphy can be reached at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com