When you’re young, your birthday means balloons and cake and friends coming over for a party and bringing you lots of presents. When you’re older, like my parents, they say they are just happy to be alive another day so that they can enjoy watching their grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up and prosper.
Notice how the parents don’t mention their adult children. What’s fun about watching children in their fifties creep closer and closer to the age when they can collect Social Security too, assuming it will help them very much when they achieve that milestone in 5 or 10 years.
Nevertheless, I’ve had a very happy day for one who is celebrating one cent over the double nickels. On Thursday night, my husband and I made devil’s food chocolate cup cakes with butter cream frosting and green sprinkles. (Think trees.) I took them with me to New Quarter Park where I was scheduled to meet several Master Naturalist friends and NQP staff to do our bluebird boxes spring cleaning. We enjoyed hearing and seeing bluebirds staking out their territory. There was usually a bird sitting on each box as we approached with our barbecue brush to sweep out last year’s poop, dirt dauber nests, and assorted clusters of spider web, insect eggs, and cocoons. Sorry about that critters. These boxes are for the birds. We moved many of the boxes so they would get the afternoon shade: as you may remember, last year was a cooker. After two hours of cleaning, we stopped at the park office where my friends and the staff sang happy birthday while I passed around the cupcakes. Did I mention that it was 70 degrees yesterday? It was an absolutely bea-u-ti-ful day to be outside with friends. We spend another 2 hours at the park for a total of 4. I feel so fortunate to have been able to spend such a la-de-da day, given the troubled world that we live in. At age 56, your birthday is what you make it.
When I came home I didn’t want to go indoors, so puttered around the yard, dividing perennials and planting them in new places in my ever shrinking lawn. A lawn is the part of your yard where you grow grass. I am on a mission to eliminate my lawn. It was 5:00 before I remembered that I needed to count birds for the Great Backyard Bird Count, so I took a glass of wine, binoculars, and notepad out to the deck to record the twilight birds.
When my husband came in from his bike ride and had cleaned up, I was still out there in the dark. I told him that for my birthday I wanted to check out the World of Wine store in New Town and use that 20% off coupon they sent to me in the mail as a birthday present. In our house, Friday it pizza night, so I suggested we could have dinner in nearby zpizza. That’s what we did, and on the way we stopped in Chico’s where everything in the store was 15% off and he bought me a pink long-sleeved tee shirt. If you go to zpizza anytime soon, I highly recommend the Mediterranean Rustic. We ate on the patio and now I understand why people are complaining so much about the crowds of unruly teens in New Town’s village square. Yes, someone did call the police.
It was a very pleasant birthday all in all and the fun continues today. My husband let me sit on the deck and count birds for the Great Back Yard Bird Count while he vacuumed. It was warm, but too windy for all but the hungriest of birds to come to my feeder. Still I meditated on each one that I saw as he or she held on tight, cracked seeds, or just sunned. While looking through the binoculars into the trees I could see the tiny buds on oak, beech, redbud getting puffy and ready to let lose a leaf or bloom. I could look and watch for hours. It always makes me think about how far I’ve come from anthropomorphic visions. How can anyone who’s looked at the natural world and thought reasonably be so limited by fundamentalist dogma? Life is more than humanity and much too long, big, small, simple, complex, and awesome. I prefer to push my thoughts in the direction of wonder.
And the birthday goes on. Tonight, Ken and I are meeting Elizabeth, Daniel, Bryce, and Matthew at Hana Sushi at Gloucester Point. I love what the Daily Press reviewer said about this place: “Sushi in Hayes? … In this area of Gloucester County – where the Guinea watermen rule – raw fish is bait. [emphasis mine] The fish you eat has been battered, deep-fried and served with a baked potato and crock of butter and sour cream.”
Speaking of getting old, I’d like to recommend that you read Shock of Gray
, by Ted C. Fishman. If you aren’t gray before reading this, you will be after. But it is very much worth the read and the raised awareness it delivers. Bottom line: medicine, nutrition, and civilization have improved our lives so much that we’re all going to live to be a hundred or very probably more. And it’s going to make the world pop as the old get older and the young get fewer. We’re going to live to be great-great grandparents a family structure enhancement that’s already common in Japan.Well, Ken and Matthew are getting ready to take a bike ride. Matthew will celebrate 33 years on Sunday. I was going to go too, but with 40 mile per hour gusts, I think not. Time to curl up with another cheerful book: A Bridge at the End of the World
by James Speth. It is the next book that my Sustainability Book Group will be discussing. I like to keep my life low key and wish it were so for others too, so that our species could celebrate a few more birthdays. But wishful thinking won’t make it so. On my birthday I’m reminded of a discussion at our last book group meeting had about when we thought the “Long Emergency” will begin. How old will we be in 2030 or 2050 or what will happen to our children and grandchildren when it will surely be so by 2100? The years roll by and we hunger to learn and know and to look longer and farther. What will the future hold?Get outdoors and enjoy the advent of spring.
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