Tag: birthdays

I went to a birthday party

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What I saw: R’s birthday party, at her mom’s boyfriend’s apartment on the upper west side, in Manhattan.

What I wore: Eileen Fisher black pull-on stretch pants that are neither too long (because I buy them in “petit” so they’re above-ankle length), too tight, or too loose, so they’re basically pajamas, but better because you can wear them outside and people don’t ask you if you’re sick; that weird new green blouse-top with a grey floral pattern; black Fluevog heels (which were appreciated by three people at the party); new tiny fancy turquoise cross-body Furla handbag that the Bacon Provider got me for my recent birthday; mascara, and, for part of the night, a party hat.

Always wear a seatbelt, even if you’re a bouquet.

What I did beforehand: took off my party shoes and put on boots and leather gloves to go cut flowers for the hostess.

Who went with me: I went alone, but when The Graduate arrived at the party after I did, it seemed he hadn’t realized I’d be there.

Elevator Selfie

How I got invited: via email, from R’s mom; it was supposed to be a surprise. It was not.

Why I went: when we first moved to NYC, in July of 2011, R (a college friend of The Graduate) went out of her way to introduce us to her family, take us to the opera, invite us to the Adirondacks, and make us feel like we actually knew people. 

Where I sat: between R’s mom’s boyfriend and her old roommate (who may have been accidentally responsible for the lack of surprise).

The hats lit up. I have food in my mouth.

Things that were sad: I have fresh home-brewed IPA to share and forgot that I meant to bring some until I was half-way there. Also, I was in the bathroom when they sang “Happy Birthday,” and there were five opera singers in attendance. Lastly, I forgot my goody-bag, and it had a Toblerone in it.




Things that were funny: party poppers, party hats, Charades (I successfully delivered “The Geography of Sub Saharan Africa” and “Inception”).

One of the primary gestures of Charades

Things that were not funny: the dog hid the whole night; the cars I had to avoid, weaving on the Saw Mill Parkway on the way home; waking up the next morning for an 8:30 lesson.

He kind of always looks like this
What it is: in the United States, people often celebrate the anniversary of their birth with a party. Traditions include, but are not limited to, a birthday cake with candles, the singing of a traditional birthday song, games, a piñata, the giving of gifts to the person having the birthday, and party favors for guests. When my children were young, we had many birthday parties at home, including one with a magician, another with the Reptile Man, and, a particular favorite, a spaceship party where the kids decorated a refrigerator box in the back yard and we had a countdown and blastoff.


Who should go: my brother once told me that you should invite everyone to parties. This is a completely unrealistic rule that I try to follow as much as possible. 

The Graduate had fun

What I saw on the way home: as I waved goodbye to R’s mother, I accidentally hailed a cab. 

A Birthday Story

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On a June 4tha few years ago, I was in the copying room before school, making a batch of quizzes. Probably I was giving myself the gift of quizzing my students on that day, or it was for Honors Geometry, which, being an Honors Class, had a number of required elements, including weekly vocabulary quizzes. June 4this my birthday.
“Sigh” is a Japanese extreme metal 
band from Tokyo, formed in 1989.
On my way out of the copying room, I encountered the magnificent form of Sister R. Sister R. taught 10th grade Scriptures, stood at least 7 feet tall, and had a neat white helmet of hair similar to the snap-on hair on a plastic Playmobil figure. Everything about her was great, from her long, large teeth or her hands the size of prayer books. She had a ready smile and an earnest stare, though one eye looked right at you, and the other eye might have looked over your shoulder. I often wondered if there were angels back there—angels only she could see.
She addressed me in her throaty whisper of a lady’s baritone, “Oh, Maggie! Let me give you a Great Big Sloppy Happy Birthday Hug!”
Because Sister R. was two feet taller, when she held out her five-foot-long arms and enveloped me in the instant before I had a chance to flee, she trapped my arms by my sides and smothered my face in the depth of her cleavage. Then, for the four-count of the intense hug, my face was surrounded by the sister’s somewhat enormous bosom, that enveloped my forehead, cheeks, and ears. Her embrace pressed the air out of me, and I thought maybe I might die there.

When she released me, I drew in a long breath of joyous relief. I was alive!  I breathed in the smells of a freshly laundered lady’s blouse, of copier toner, and of the plaster walls and varnished woodwork of a hundred-year-old Catholic school. I felt reborn.

The Numbers

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Americans write the date in the format “Month/Day/Year,” so today’s date is one of those fun sequences (10/11/12) that makes a memorable birthday or wedding anniversary. I have a friend whose birthday is 11/11, so last year’s fell on 11/11/11. I think I probably know someone on the Facebook who has the birthday 12/12, but if I can search by birthday on the Facebook I do not know how. The 12 months of our calendar and 30 or 31 days within are pretty arbitrary anyway; a 52 week year breaks evenly into 13 four-week-long months, so why don’t we add a month?
I know a bunch of folks with birthdays which fall on other holidays, like Halloween and Christmas, dictating not only the color of the wrapping paper of every gift of their whole lives, but also over-shadowing their anniversaries. No doubt there were children born on a December 7th in the 1930s for whom the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor forever ruined their birthdays. I have a couple of friends who were born on September 11th.
Church Street, TriBeCa, September 11th, 2012
On September 11, 1857, something like 120 Arkansas emigrants were murdered by Mormons and either Paiute Indians or some folks dressed up to look like them. There many different accounts of this story, and you might be interested to compare this one to others you can find.
September 11, 1971 marks the death of Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev is famous for a shoe-banging incident at the U.N. and for warning us all that “We will bury you!” and, “Your children will be communists,” which Barry Goldwater used in his political television ads for his run for President of the United States. In 1959, Khrushchev visited the United States, and if you have 5 minutes you should watch this.
My childhood neighborhood friend with the braids was married on a September 11, in the 80s, in a ceremony in the old Catholic cathedral in downtown St. Louis. I was one of many bridesmaids, all in mint green taffeta, and I remember being very hot while we were kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing. 
That same day, September 11, 1987, in St. Andrews, a suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, the reggae musician known as Peter Tosh was shot and killed in his home. He was 42. A lively retelling of this brutal murder can be read here.
 The morning of September 11, 2001, I was eating breakfast in our kitchen in Seattle with all three kids, getting ready to go to school. The phone rang. It was my mother, explaining that she knew I didn’t watch TV but I better turn it on because something was happening in New York.
We had a small TV in the kitchen, and we turned it on in time to see the footage of the first tower engulfed and collapsing as well as footage of the second tower being hit. My children were very young, and unaccustomed to TV news, and did not know what they were looking at was real. While I was trying to explain to them that it was something serious and bad, the phone rang. It was a friend who mis-dialed another, mutual friend, with a similar number. A native New Yorker, the caller was completely distraught; I wonder if she even remembers calling me that day.
Last year was the tenth anniversary of the attack, and though we were living in North Dreadful, it was observed with a ceremony at the public school with solemnity and formality. My youngest son missed this event completely, thanks to a stomach ache.
This year, we live within view of the new towers under construction. There is a memorial at the site of the now missing towers, but I still have not visited it yet. I was awestruck by the two towers of light shining there the two nights of the 10th and the 11th which I find a fitting memorial: abstract, quiet and ephemeral, requiring no tickets or online registration.
  

Gray Area

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Schwartz

My niece was graduating high school in a few months, so I asked her mother what colors to think about for a quilt for her to take to college. Her reply: “[She]likes grey, colors that go with grey, and grey are her never-miss choices. The colors you see in those …pictures …represent grey and things that go with grey; she’ll wear other colors that go with grey, but I think she has something grey on practically every day.”
So I started thinking about a gray quilt.
I enjoy making monochromatic quilts. I have made two all-red quilts, an all-green quilt, a couple of all-pink baby quilts, and an all-blue quilt top. Gray is tricky because there are green-grays and brown-grays and pale grays and if you put them all together they appear to be different colors. Gray fabric is hard to find as well. I managed to lay in a supply of darker and lighter grays and set to work.
I do not remember how or why I decided on equilateral triangles for this quilt. They are a satisfying geometric shape to me, being both equilateral and equiangular, but they are not particularly easy to cut from fabric without a template.
Adding the binding
Machine quilting
The cat is always interested in sewing projects, being a big fan of sleeping on the ironing board, the sewing table, and my lap. This time, the dogs got involved, too, and sprawled out on the quilt in progress, especially when they had been invited no to do so. When I bought the batting, I had to make a special trip to the fabric store, and when I brought it home I unwrapped and unfurled it to get some of the wrinkles out. Then I took the dogs for a walk. When I got home, I found that the cat had attacked the cotton batting, taking several large bites out of it.  I was able to trim off his damage, though I did have to go back to the fabric store for more of the backing fabric, which in the end I had not bought enough of.
Making a baby quilt can take a weekend, if you know what you’re doing. Making a quilt big enough to go on a twin or full-size bed takes months, even if you do all the steps by machine. When you make a quilt for a child, you can use airplane fabric for the back and be sure that he will love it. When you make a quilt for a teenager, you run the risk of making something she doesn’t like and will never want to use. My goal was to make the quilt inoffensive enough that at least she might use it under another bedspread.
Dogs testing new quilt
I finished in time for her birthday and graduation. It was well-received. Better still, she tweeted at me a couple of weeks ago: “Did I ever mention to you that almost every single person who comes into my room compliments the awesome quilt?”
The next one I am planning is for the toughest customer of all: my youngest son.

The Peony of Coincidence

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Before my parents put a pool in the backyard of the house I grew up in, there was a peony in the yard. I think the flowers were dark red. It was memorable for being a plant that emerged from the dead dirt like a miracle, and most especially because of the large black ants that were to be found crawling all over the buds.  
I have read that if you want ant-free peonies, you can cut them when the buds are “marshmallow soft.” You brush off the ants outside and can let them bloom inside in a vase.  The ants are irrelevant and do not facilitate the blooming; they are simply tasting the sugar on the flowers.
Ants were part of my childhood. Our house had the small kind of black ant, the ones that would find a bit of food on the counter and march in a dense line to dismantle it and carry home the crumbs. I watched them often. Despite being afraid of many interesting things as a child (my grandparents, bees, throwing and catching, swimming, dogs, crows), I have no specific memory of being afraid of ants. My younger brother would lie on the pavement on his belly and squish them with his finger, saying, “Gee-um! Gee-um!” I can also recall a couple of experiments on ant hills involving water or hot wax, but I wielded no magnifying glass on them.  
As an adult, I take a keen interest in most of the things I was fearful of as a child (my grandparents, bees, dogs, crows), and I can recommend a book about ants that I read a number of years ago called, “The EarthDwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants,” by Erich Hoyt. Ants, like bees and termites, live in colonies which function as a single organism.
As for peonies, they are always blooming on my birthday in early June, and in the past I always asked for some. A few years back, Schwartzdeveloped a taste for the peony petals and heartily consumed a number of them. This produced in the cat some projectile vomiting of a surprisingly violent and comical nature. After I did some superficial research online, I was able to find peonies listed as “toxic to cats” on an ASPCA web site and “mildly toxic to cats” in most other forums. I also observed that there are other resources that consider red peony root to be a traditional herbal remedy for people for “clearing the blood.”
Today is my birthday, but it is also the anniversary of the massacre of Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square.   The powers that be in China seem to believe that censoring the Internet by banning search terms will contain or erase or alter the memories of its people. The Shanghai Composite Index managed to provide its own random reminder by closing down by 64.89 points and so had to be added to the list of banned terms.  
Of course, peonies are said to have magical properties, containing nymphs inside their petals which escape when they bloom. Everyone knows that the peony nymphs are freed to call to the snapping turtles to tell them to come to shore and lay their eggs, but perhaps they also wish to promote democracy for the 1.2 billion people who live in China.

Today is my Birthday

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Today is my birthday. Like many adults, I am ambivalent about my birthday. Of course, the alternative to having a birthday is being dead, so I’ll happily take the birthday.  Hooray! I am officially one year older! 
I won’t have a big party with a puppet show or a magician.  I will not be given a basket of kittens or a red bicycle with ape hanger handlebars and a black banana seat.  Anything I might have wanted for myself I might have gotten myself already (although a both a new bicycle and basket of kittens does sound fun right now).
One thing I always appreciate on my birthday is a home-made card.  This card is from a number of years ago.  It was made by an old and dear friend who is today a dog owner herself and is taking in some foster puppies from the animal shelter for a month.  She will no doubt have puppy poops in her house.

Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger

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Once when my kids were very little, I pulled in to the full-serve gas station for a fill-up.  A baby was sleeping in the back of the mini-van, and I didn’t want to get gas on my hands. I was listening to a local public radio station that played folk music in the daytime. They played a Pete Seeger tune, so I didn’t shut off the radio while the fellow filled the tank.
I have been listening to Pete Seeger for so long that I can’t say how long. I credit him with teaching me to sing at least twenty songs and probably more. My husband taught himself to play banjo, using his book “How to Play Five-String Banjo.” My youngest son’s middle name is Peter, given to him in honor of Pete Seeger.  Pete Seeger’s songs are folk songs, protest songs, work songs, and songs for children. He made other peoples’ songs famous, and his songs were made famous by others. If you ever had the privilege of seeing him live, you were exhorted to sing along. I certainly hope you did.
They played a second Pete Seeger tune while I paid and drove away, and a third song began while I sat at the stop light. I began to cry, believing that the only reason a radio station would play three Pete Seeger songs in a row was because he had died. When the DJ finally came on to name the songs, he wished Pete Seeger a happy birthday, because he was 81.
Today, eleven years later, Pete Seeger is 92.