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Birthday Goodness


So today is my birthday and I am forty-six – in case you wondered. I didn’t awake feeling old, but I did have a headache. It’s all the Ashtanga this week. Yoga is not usually an intensely warming activity but Ashtanga employs a breathing method designed to make a person sweat. Two days in a row and I am dry as toast.

By 8 AM this morning, I’d been bathed in birthday goodness though. Two cards. One from Rob that brought tears to my eyes because it was so sweet and romantic and just all around awesome. The other from Dee which she added her own sentiments too in her own words. She is much prouder of what she writes than what is in the card to begin with.

Before Dee caught her bus, she and Rob gave me my first gift – well, only gift as nothing else had arrived in the post yet (Rob shops online).

They led me into the living room where a huge box was draped with a blanket.

“I told Dee that this was something you really wanted,” Rob said.

Dee looked dubious and when I pulled off the blanket, I knew why. It was a mixer. Not a seven-year old’s idea of a great present.

But it sure was mine!

A Cuisinart 7 quart, stainless steel, nearly industrial strength mixer. It even has a cover to keep the flour from coating the rest of the kitchen, which is an issue when baking scones and for an asthmatic like myself.

“Now, I can entertain my wild ideas about selling baked goods at the farmer’s market next summer,” I said.

“You are becoming quite the bohemian,” Rob said.

Yeah, dreaming of a yoga studio and selling edibles made from scratch with an emphasis on nutrition that is sadly lacking in commercial bakeries these days. Pretty soon I’ll be wearing flip-flops year-round and studying Wicca and working on a degree in natural healing. Okay, I wouldn’t be wearing flip-flops. It’s the toe thing. I don’t know how people stand that thing between their toes. But I am a leap closer to my goal of shunning cultural norms as they are written in concrete and paved over by asphalt.

“You can have your office up above my studio and I will sell baked goods and tea in between classes,” I said.

“And I will be this fat bastard who has to roll around on his industrial strength chair because of all your baking,” he only half-joked because he has sweet teeth.

Oh, and today is my first payday at Care2. They’ve published 7 of my articles. Five this week. It’s not a lot of money. In fact, it’s barely any money at all after Uncle Sam snatches back his war surtax, but it’s still sweet.

And, my birthdays isn’t even over yet. Rob took off a half-day to have lunch and spend the afternoon together. We have a sitter for the evening. Birthday goodness abounds.

AND,

there is still Christmas coming round the corner as my husband understands the importance of keeping my birthday goodness separate from my Christmas goodness. Not a lot of people understand the significance of this to those of us born in the neighborhood of Jesus Christ. I spent years – decades – putting up with the combo presents from friends and even some family. Being born within three-ish weeks on either side means a life time of people rationalizing their cheapness at your expense.

But, today is sunshine and showers of love and a brand new – totally awesome beyond my ability to truly convey – mixer. And it’s only 9:22 AM.

The Adventures of St. Nick*


Just about everyone we knew as kids celebrated St. Nicolas day but us. The leaving of small toys or treats in children’s shoes was not a tradition my dad had any interest in. If he or Mom were St. Nick recipients as wee ones, I can’t recall a single tale. Mom came from a fairly well-off background by comparison, but her father was a skinflint, who I highly doubt participated in the consuming side of Christmas any more than he was forced to. Dad’s family was dirt poor. Great-Grandaddy Christie lost the family farm in the bank crash after the first world war and Grandaddy and Gran were essentially the poor relations, who tenant farmed for years before winding up farming Gran’s family farm for first her father and then her sister. One Christmas, Dad and his four siblings got a single pair of skis which they took turns with until Uncle Leo ran into a pig and broke them. More than once I can recall Dad and his second oldest sister discussing how they each got an orange apiece in their stocking and that this was a rare treat. So, St. Nick? Not so much.

I may have put something in Dee’s shoe when she was two or three, but keeping track of holidays I didn’t grow up celebrating was not long on my list of necessities, so that good intention died before it had chance to take root. My sister, DNOS, however, has managed to instill the specialness of the day into N2 (Nephew2).

“But he slept over at Mom’s Saturday night and I forgot about it completely, ” she confided to me on the phone. “I hoped he would just forget about it, but nope, we were in the car on our way home from school and he wonders why St. Nick forgot him.”

“So what did you tell him?” I asked. DNOS is a great one for covering up parental faux-pas with stories that only an 8 year old could possibly believe. I admire that.

“I told him that St. Nick visits houses alphabetically and that he probably hadn’t gotten to the O’s yet.”

And N2 bought this as reasonable as any third grader would because “alphabetical” is how the world works.

After they got home from hockey practice later that evening, DNOS hustled N2 downstairs to strip him of his gear and pop him in the shower. According to my husband, hockey gear takes on an odor of its own and so, I imagine, does the child wearing the gear. As N2 showered, his father snuck upstairs and began stomping loudly about the living room. It’s a little house and BIL is a big guy, so let’s imagine timbers rattling.

“Mom,” N2 pops out of the shower, “There’s someone in the house!”

Eyes as big as saucers and shivering with chill and fear in his birthday suit, he began yelling for BIL.

“Dad! DAD! There’s an intruder upstairs.”

BIL has stealthily slipped back downstairs without notice and asks, “Are you sure, N2?”

“There’s an intruder!! Dad, get the gun!”

BIL hunts. He keeps his arsenal in a locked cabinet in the basement and he dutifully went for a shotgun and went upstairs to “look around”.

“Oh my god, Mom. There’s an intruder! And I’m naked!” N2 was literally beside himself with horror at this point and how DNOS and BIL live with the guilt is beyond me. They are great actors though and neither one cracked so much as a smile, let alone snickered.

“I didn’t see anything N2,” BIL reported when he returned.

“Get the soap out of my hair, Mom! I need to get dressed!”

A few minutes later, sans soap and pj’d, N2 charges ahead of his parents to the upstairs.

“Hey Buzz, nice of you to go first,” BIL calls after him and N2 freezes in mid-step.

“Mom, you go ahead of me and Dad you go ahead of Mom,” he said.

They crept through the kitchen and into the living room to find, not an intruder, but three St. Nick’d shoes. N2 took the contents out and distributed them and sat heavily on the rocker, clutching his small toy.

“Mom. Dad. I have to say this how I have to say this,” he said.

And they waited with bated breath.

“Dad, you almost frickin’ shot St. Nick! He’s Santa’s brother, and I wouldn’t have got anything this year if you’d killed him.”

And no, they didn’t laugh. They are that good.

*This tale is told with the permission of DNOS, who I am sure recognizes that I didn’t get it word for word as she told it because I am not the story-teller that she is.

I Have Been Writing – Honest


But not here. I guess you could say I have been stepping out on my blog and dear readers à la Tiger Woods except that I have told you that I am poly-blogging, so you went into this with wide open eyes. Please don’t reach for the 7 iron.

Two pieces up at 50 Something. One on marriage, or what constitutes a happy one, that I wrote after reading Weil’s book excerpt at the NYT’s and another on our adventures with the Balloon Man at the children’s Christmas party that Rob’s company hosts every year.

I’ve had three pieces up at Care2 (here, here and here) and even got a kudo from my editor despite my profound lack of journalistic ability. The job is a challenge for me. I like challenges, but I hate not being awesome at what I do. I think this is why I really need to be self-employed. It’s less stressful. My editor also informed me that the second piece on entertainment education provoked a fellow blogger there to request response time – “respectfully, of course” – which makes me shudder a bit. Bloggers are seldom all that subtle or respectful when they take an opposite view and “respectful” usually means that the blogger will not call you names or imply you are descended from cousins in a flaming sort of way but rather in the unmistakably subtle way that people with a flare for words have. Naturally, I can hardly wait to read it.

Ironically, I just left a comment on another blog about how I find posts that are merely excuses to link to other people’s work to be extremely lazy, but since I am linking to my own writing – I will give myself a big ole pass.