A Special Day For Birthdays

Happy Birthday To My Wife, Evie, And Son, Tom

6:44

7:02

I was up just before 6;00, to a star-filled sky, a dark living room.  Now, at 6:30, as I sit here waiting for the sun, the sky is orange with a vast, thin horizontal cloud hanging over all of Bemus Bay.  Today is a special day in our family, my wife, Evie's birthday (75) as well as our son, Tom's (51).  So it has always been a fun day of celebration.  We just have to celebrate in different cities. I got in a half hour paddle, off towards the sunrise at 7:10 and home by 7:35, giving me plenty of time to get over to Bemus Point for breakfast.

Kayaking Towards The Sun

Yesterday was a loss for both of us and I am not sure why.  Neither of us got much if anything done, perhaps we needed a day of rest.  We started the day with morning coffee with Scott and Mike, friends from Hudson who spent the night.  Around 9:00, Evie made a breakfast of an omelet with tomatoes and feta cheese and bagels, just right. The guys left for home by 10:00 and after cleaning up the kitchen, I migrated to a couch to read and Evie went outside to enjoy the sun and cool weather, another amazing late summer day.

By 12:30, Evie came in briefly and put together a tomato salad with vinegar, oil and feta cheese for lunch and I watched my show, City On The Hill which is coming to its end.  Evie then went back out to her chair and I read and napped briefly.  Mid-afternoon, I went over to our new neighbors house to watch workers put in two huge cement tanks for a new septic system.  How they managed to drive a truck into their front yard and then lower these monster tanks is a miracle. It's not going to be a cheap process, perhaps a much as twenty grand for a new system.

Around 5:30 we had a glass of wine and by 6:30, Evie had put the leftover moussaka in the oven to warm and made a salad.  We ate watching a couple of Colbert shows, then two more episodes of the riveting but difficult to watch UNBELIEVABLE on Netflix. This is not for the faint-hearted.  It's based on a true story, the search for a serial rapist.

Another poem I have liked that seems perfect for today, especially the last four lines.

VII by Wendell Berry I know I am getting old and I say so, but I don't think of myself as an old man. I think of myself as a young man with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither young nor old, but simply new, always counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds —no mere measure or geometry, no cubism, can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies. There is no science for this, or art either. Even the old body is new—who has known it before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be replaced by a body yet older and again new. The clouds are rarely absent from our sky over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore that I watch as, growing on the riverbank, it forecloses the horizon, like the years of an old man. And you, who are as old almost as I am, I love as I loved you young, except that, old, I am astonished at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.