Birthdays

It was my birthday recently. I am now fifty one. I was worried that I would feel sad on this birthday. My last birthday was such a magical celebration in all ways.We traveled with my best friends to New York. It went on and on for the entire month of August actually, until I finally had to plead my friends and family to stop. It was
perfect.

This year we had just returned from our annual week in the the Sierras and we had no plans. This always worries me a little, I say I don"t want to do anything for my birthday and then the day comes around and I feel forgotten and unnoticed. I struggle with the perpetration of this celebration tradition, yet I look forward to the queen-for-a-day status like a raving maniac. This year we got home and when I checked my messages there were so few.i grumbled and whined a bit but then I was brave and
persuaded myself that jam making was a great thing to do on one"s 51st birthday.

The day before my birthday. I went to the farmer"s market for the jam fruit and luckily ran into lots of folks and received loads of phone calls. It seemed that everyone got back into town.My spirits were rising. My band assembled at my house at 11:00 am. We ended up playing music until 5:00 pm and then we were invited to a ping pong tournament and I stayed there at that lovely house in the Santa Cruz Mountains summer night drinking delicious homemade pinot noir until midnight.

The morning of my birthday my family showered me with gifts. My mom gave me an ottoman shaped like a turtle. I don"t remember having animal shaped furniture in our house when I was growing up. What about me screams "I must have that leather turtle shaped ottoman?" It worries me a bit. I must admit that is wonderfully comfortable and Mark is using it everyday when he reads the paper and drinks his coffee. I took the turtle head off so that I wouldn"t trip over it. It now looks like a turtle hiding his head. The tail is to remain. Mark and A gave me a fabulous ring made by my dear friend Ann Wasserman and Stand Up Paddle Board lessons.

I made the jam and then zipped off to the a bridal shower of an old friend. I had a great group of women friends in the early nineties. We had been thrown together by the commonality of our sons. They all went to the same preschool. When my son died they were there and were the strong shoulders that I needed. After our daughter was born we divided. Not because they were not happy for me, but nine year old boys and newborn girls have little in common. We stayed loosely in touch, but stopped sharing
celebrations and vacations together. My son would have turned twenty two this year. It is always hard to pass these milestones. What would he be doing? Graduating from
college? It is hard to write of him. He is the fabric of my life.

These women, these lovely women brought me back in. We picked up as if we had never left off. Our lives have taken many turns and twists that we could not have anticipated. We have navigated through them and then on my fifty first birthday thirteen years later we were together again, older, the same, different, calmer, and reflective.

That same evening another arm of my old friends had us up to dinner in their quaint mountain home. We sat on the porch, cold and happy, drinking sparkling wines. Later we played guitars until our teenagers begged us to stop so that they could go to bed.

At 2:00 pm I fell into bed feeling excited to be fifty-one. Only nine more years until my 60th. I can start planning that celebration.