Before the number of food items goes into serious decline and the Appleblossom amaryllis starts to sprout, I thought I’d better go blog quick that the KnitTalk Yahoo list has an annual opt-in knitswap, run by Margo Lynn, who gave my name to Rena this year.

I opened a box that was ready to burst on Christmas morning.  Thank you, Rena, and wow! The handknitted dishcloth alone would have been enough to totally make my day, and then there’s Zephyr in Elderberry, and chocolate, and the amaryllis, and chocolate, and a notepad, and hot chocolate, and ornaments, and hot chocolate, and a stuffed little pad for keeping my mug of cocoa warm, and did I mention hot chocolate?

I’m displaying it all on top of Robert’s handwoven Medicine Blanket, which has been the backdrop for many a blog photo by now.

On another note, my husband just got a video camera for the computer and I got to teleconference tonight with our older daughter and son-in-law in Vermont and wish Jonathan a happy birthday and actually wave hi. We all made goofy faces at each other like little kids just because we could.  Our daughter held Eve, her black cat, in front of her camera and told us how funny it had been to see Eve running off down the stairs with a ball of white yarn in her mouth, while the other grandcat at the top of the stairs was attacking the steadily-lengthening end of yarn.

Almost present.  Almost close enough to offer them a mug of hot chocolate.

But guess what I sent them for Christmas too?  And that they drank this morning, on a snowy cold day over there?

Thank you, Rena.  I love December!

On a more cheerful note: I woke up this morning from a dream of the church doors being flung open, a joyous crowd streaming out, and the narrator to the dream exclaiming, “Let’s celebrate!”

Heck yeah!

Yesterday was a little like this square: I was casting it off when the phone rang.  Later, I thought I was done with the thing, went to pick it up, and found out that when I’d gotten up, I not only hadn’t finished casting off, but I’d managed somehow to yank the needle out and it was frogging itself as I’d run for the phone.  I’m too deaf to hear the tinktinktink that had been going on behind me.

Oops.  so I had to reknit a bunch.  Eh.

And I’m sitting here this morning thinking, the trick is not to let the Crohn’s unravel me.  It’s just a few rows in my overall life.  So.

My son and his bride arrived from the airport Christmas night in time for dinner. Her family is having a big reunion tonight; quite a few of them live in this town.

I’d knitted a shawl for her grandmother, and I know I have a picture of it somewhere in my files, but I forgot to take another one just to make sure, so I can’t show it; I’ll ask the kids to snap me one.  She’s a tiny woman, so I knitted her the Constance shawl, which, when done up in fingering weight, is one of the smaller patterns in “Wrapped in Comfort.”

I learned something along the way of knitting hers and my sister’s Christmas present: I’d done them in one strand of laceweight baby alpaca or cashmere and one strand of Claudia’s silk.  Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous effect, with the silk shimmering around the quieter fiber much more prominently than when they’re blended together into a single strand.  But–and this is the big but–if you snag the shawl, the slippery silk tends to pull out merrily while the baby alpaca stays obediently in its place.

It is much easier to work a strand back in that is in tandem with its knitted-along partner. This was a bear to fix–but it was doable and I did it and my sister’s was none the worse for it.

And so I was hesitant to send Kim’s grandmother’s offwhite shawl along, as if there were something wrong with it.  It was absolutely gorgeous, and I would have worn it myself–gingerly–in a heartbeat, but I didn’t; it was hers. I thought about knitting another one, but that didn’t feel right; the one I’d made for her couldn’t belong to anybody else.  It was hers!

So I sent it off with Kim to give Grandma with careful warnings and wondering nervousness as to whether it was good enough.

Silly me.  Her grandmother was ecstatic.  Yes, yes, she’d treat it carefully, okay, but WOW! LOOK at this!  Kim said Grandma had made everybody laugh when she exclaimed, “I have to buy a new dress to go with this!”

And I was worried?

(p.s. For a little holiday cheer, may I recommend Lawdog’s blog post here.  No, (looking at the first paragraph or two), I mean it!)

We got the unwanted message: Commuknity in San Jose was closing.  As in, really closing: their space would be available Jan. 1.

They had been waiting over a month for me to pick up two of my shawls they’d had for a show, and they’re further away than I had been able to muster the energy to drive to and I just hadn’t done it yet.  But I knew they needed to have one less thing to worry about and to have to keep track of under the circumstances.  So.

Richard took me down there today; I needed to be up to it, so that was that and we simply went.  Gail and Tom, the owners, happened to be right at the inner doors at the moment we walked in the outer ones (there’s a little alcove between), and greeted us with much emotion. Gail said, “I’ll go get your shawls” before I even said anything, allowing me to plop gratefully into a chair in the alcove.    I looked at the very long line of buyers and knew I could never make it that long, much though I would have loved to have given one last show of support to my friends, and when someone walked in the outer door, stopped, and coughed right at me, having utterly no idea what she had just done, that sealed that.  No way.  Too risky.  I had to get out of that exposure.

But not before Gail and I threw our arms around each other with her worrying about me and me sorry she was losing her yarn shop they’d poured heart and soul into.  It had been a well-named store.  Crum.

We were driving back up the freeway heading for home and Richard was saying how, chemo and Crohn’s flare or not, he felt cabin fever would get to me and that he needed to take me places at least on weekends till I was back to getting out and about on my own.  I told him I was wanting to knit a hat, and that after four years of knitting shawls and using lace and fingering weight and baby alpaca, I just didn’t have wool in worsted weight in the colors and softness I wanted.  And, I added–that’s the exit to Purlescence, by the way.  He swung immediately over to the offramp and to Purlescence we went.

Where nobody was sick.  Where we happened to catch the place at an unusually quiet moment.  Where my friend Mary happened to come in just then in need of a hug, and Kevin and Sandi got one too for good measure and Kay helped me find the superwash Cascade.

Where I supported my local yarn store, and there will now indeed be a hat.

My dad sent me a box of amaryllis bulbs (thank you, Dad!) and told me to open it at my birthday and not wait for Christmas; you never know what might already be sprouting in there in the nice warm house.

When an amaryllis thinks it’s time to bloom, it does what it can to make the world beautiful whether it’s been planted in soil and given the water it needs or not.  Go!  Tall stalks are nice to have, but the flowers are what its life is all about.

I opened the box and this Antarctic one had buds almost ready to burst out of a stalk whose shape was curved by the restricting protective netting around it.

Flowers in the color of the snow we miss and that blossomed the day before Christmas Eve. Glorious.

Meantime, having shown you my “Part ridge in a pear tree” awhile back, I thought I’d show you what it looks like now.  The tree continues to recover well.  In this climate, it lets its leaves go after New Year’s–not till it’s finished doing its Rudolph impersonation.

Merry Christmas to all, a happy Festival of Lights, and the peace and joy of the season to you and yours.

Tina, did you see this?! That video–wow.  (They’ve now edited out the part where the wire basket suspended by the helicopter kept getting tossed away by the waves, over and over, as the person inside the car tried to grab it–and it was 17 degrees F while all this was going on.  She did finally succeed in being rescued with her child.)  Thank you thank you thank you Montgomery County Maryland rescue personnel!

I can tell you the names of the families living at the cross street where this happened. If you look at the pictures, there’s a traffic light ahead at Seven Locks: turn left, go maybe half a mile, turn into the neighborhood and you’re at the house I grew up in. Turn right instead at Seven Locks, and you’re in Tina’s.  The teacher on her way to work who had a suddenly bursting wall of water and mud bury her car was going to the elementary school that Karen and Scott went to.

Everybody’s safe.  Cars and roads and 96-inch (the Post now says 66″) water mains can be replaced.

And the firemen marveled that they just happened to be heading out for breakfast right when it happened so that they saw it and they were right behind that teacher and were able to call out immediately for massive reinforcements as they pulled their truck from car to car, pulling people out.  The helicopter reached the ones they could not.

They were immediately at hand when they were so severely needed.  The choreography of God.  Wow.

(Edited to add this picture I took on River Road last year of the rock quarry that is halfway down the hill there where the water main broke–we were not allowed to play near the quarry growing up.   It was at the end of our street.)

Okay, first, here’s the recipe:

CRANBERRY BARS

Cookie crust: oven at 350.  Grease edges of 15x10 cookie sheet.  Cut
1 c of cold butter into 2 1/2 c flour; don't use a cuisinart or anything
that would pulverize the butter, you want it lumpy to come out crisp.  Add
1/2 c sugar and 1/2 tsp salt. Press firmly in pan, bake 20-23 minutes or
till golden.  Top with filling right away and bake again.

Filling: 4 eggs, 1 c. corn syrup, 1 c sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 3 tbl melted 
butter, 2 c
coarsely chopped cranberries, 1 c. coarsely chopped pecans.  Beat eggs,
corn syrup, sugar, and butter.  Stir in cranberries and nuts.  Immediately
pour over hot crust as it comes out of the oven, spreading it out.  Bake
25-30 minutes or until set.  Cool; refrigerate it to be able to cut it
really cleanly.

Now the story:

My son John has been on a mission for the Mormon Church for a year now. Like his brother did, he’s serving in the South.

My friend Bonnie, whom I’ve known online for ten years and have long wanted to meet in person, got to meet John instead.  He had something that needed mending; she told me her shop’s address (she’s a seamstress) and warmly welcomed him in and waved away any offer of reimbursement and then told me what a nice kid I have. Look who’s talking.  Thank you, Bonnie!

I got a phone call a few weeks ago from a member of John’s ward (congregation), asking me for a recipe for his favorite comfort-food cookies and for a few photographs of his childhood; she was going to throw a surprise Christmas party for all the missionaries around her area.

I sent off a few pictures and typed out my cranberry bar squares.  And then John got transferred to a different city last week, and that, I thought, was the end of that.

My phone rang this afternoon: the woman had the cranberry bars in the oven and wanted to know how to tell for sure when they were done.  Till the edges look golden, I told her.  But–he’s been transferred! I added, not wanting to disappoint her, but.

Yes, Christy said, she knew that.  But she was so sure it would make his day.  (Well, yeah, it totally would. He could snarf half a 15×11 pan of those by himself.)

And then she stunned me: she said her husband was a pilot and they were going to go fly the quick hop skip and a jump and take him those cookies, warm out of the oven.

Oh. My. Goodness.

She told me her own son was serving a mission in a place where she’d sent him a Christmas box in November and he hadn’t gotten it yet and probably wouldn’t in time.  She couldn’t fix that.  But she could help my kid feel loved from home and by the people around him.

How on earth can you thank someone for something like that?!

I called my mom yesterday to wish her a happy birthday, and she told me that, reading my blog, it was clear to her that I’d been having a particularly happy week.

I answered that my flare had actually gotten worse during the week and that things were being pretty rough.

But you know? I got off that phone, thought about it, savored the tone that had been in her voice as she’d said that, re-read the week’s entries, and realized she was right. It *had* been a happy week!  No amount of Crohn’s could change all the things that were wonderful.  The surprise party and all the kind comments that flowed into the blog afterwards, Richard and Michelle being marvelously helpful, the two friends who came over during the week as well as the ones who came to the party, Mom’s silk blouse arriving in time for her birthday…

And in a rush of gratitude, I sat down and yesterday’s post just poured out of my fingertips.

So I have to offer one correction: Mom didn’t just teach me to see the best in others.  She taught me to look for the best in every situation as well.  She did it again.  Thanks, Mom!

I had a friend, growing up, who felt she was not supposed to come home with dirt on her clothes. A young lady was not to do that.

Which is how I learned early on to treasure my mother’s take on us after a good day down at the creek or in the woods in the back yard: she would give us an appraising look with a grin on her face and pronounce, “You must have had *fun* getting THAT dirty!”

She had this big bicycle horn she would raise high and honk to call us home from all over the neighborhood; all the other parents and children knew that sound and if we didn’t hear it would go, Hey, you, your mom’s calling you.

We would hold back and go one at a time, then run from our game of four-square or what have you on up the sloping street to Mom, especially in the summertime when the light continued for so long after dinner: run run running trying to pick up speed and at the end leaping up into her arms where she would swing us around and around and around on the grass next to the street, often till we were so dizzy we would fall down in delight when she let us down into the grass (or if that didn’t work, airplane our arms around and around till we made ourselves dizzy enough).  Just every now and then, she would fall down laughing too.

We learned we couldn’t be jealous and try to push ahead of the next kid–Mom couldn’t catch two at once.   She was perfectly capable of turning her back and chirping cheerfully as she walked away, “Nope! Lost your chance!”  Awww, MOooooommmmm…”  We had to take turns.

I wrote in my book about my friend Lisa, who 18 years ago volunteered to watch my preschoolers Monday through Friday mornings so I could go do swim therapy after my lupus diagnosis.  And like I did with my own kids, I used to swing her preschoolers around and around like my mom had done with me.

When Lisa’s family flew back to this area for her mother-in-law’s funeral, I swung her two little boys and their little sister around and around till we all fell down, for old times’ sake, even though they were beginning to be a bit big for it.  Arthritis shmitis.  I was not about to miss the opportunity. They’d been such a big part of my life for the three years we’d traded off watching each others’ kids, and I wanted them to remember the fun parts.

Lisa later had one more child, who of course had no connection to his older siblings’ California memories.

A few years ago, they decided to come vacation in Washington DC to coincide with when we were going to be there for our oldest’s Maryland wedding reception.  We had them over to my folks’ house and had a grand time.  And before they left, in my folks’ grassy front yard, to the delight of the youngest, I ditched my now-cane and picked him up and swung him around and around and around till we both fell down laughing. (There was no way I wasn’t going over too, nowadays.)

What delighted me was the instant reaction of the older siblings to their little brother: “NOW you’ve had the Sister Hyde experience!”  They still remembered being swung around! And they were glad for him that he got to have that!

My mom taught me how to do that.

My mom taught me to laugh when life makes you dizzy.

My mom taught me to see the best in others.

My mom (and Dad, too, I should add) taught me to go play in the woods and splash in the creek.  To admire the box turtles munching the mayapples but leave the snapping turtles be. To fill the birdfeeder without fail when it was cold and to laugh at the antics of the squirrels trying to get at it (and not to mind feeding them, too).

My mom taught this high-strung child how to chill out.  When my then-bachelor brother told her he could never have six kids like she had had, that he just didn’t have the patience, she stared at her older son a moment and then guffawed, “How do you think I *learned* it?!”  On the job training!

Happy birthday, Mom. Thank you.  I speak on behalf of all of us when I say, your six kids love you. Very much.  Wishing you a little bit of creek, a little bit of dirt on your new silk blouse, and go twirl till you’re dizzy!

This time of year, the UPS drivers around here all have an extra on the truck: someone to dash to the door with the boxes while the regular driver drives to try to speed up the process with all the extra deliveries going on.  So it was an unfamiliar face that rang the doorbell, and he was halfway back to the truck by the time I opened the door and called after him my standard, “Thank you!”

The guy looked startled.  It amused me.

The second time, a few days later, same guy running, he waved back with a smile.

The third time…

There was a woman I’d known whom I’d thought had moved away years ago after she’d been widowed. She kind of dropped out of sight.  Come to find out through mutual friends this week that  she did still live here, and I said how much I’d love to see her.  I didn’t have a phone number for her.

Monday my phone rang.  They had passed the word along, and she was just as glad to hear I wanted to see her as I was that she was still in the area.

Wednesday she came over, and had just gotten out of her car when the UPS truck pulled up alongside it.  She was parked right in front of my door and was on her way to it; I had heard her car pull up and was just then opening the door to come out to greet her.

The new guy handed her my package after she told him sure; meantime, I was on my way.

I hadn’t seen her in probably ten years.  She’d changed enough I probably wouldn’t have recognized her on the street had I not had any context, unless I heard her voice, and we threw our arms around each other in great joy at seeing each other, made all the more intense for wishing we hadn’t waited so long to look each other up.  Hugs!  With that package in her hand against my back as she held me, a cane in her other hand.

I glanced up to see both men in that truck.  They’d hesitated rather than revving up the engine to go, watching, not wanting to miss that moment.  Their eyes were big and their smiles as wide as ours.

As my former UPS guy once exclaimed to me, “I love my job this time of year!”

“They didn’t plow the highway this side of Point of the Mountain, Dad, I’m going to miss my flight!…

They delayed my flight!…

Maybe…”

And she made it! Yay! Merry Christmas! Welcome home! To semi-sunny California, where it was cold enough it could have snowed here last night too.  Our heater huffed and it puffed, and it blew the front of the house to a balmy 61.4 degrees F in the living room.

Could y’all throw some snowballs for us out there, if you’ve got the makings?  Freezer scrapings just don’t have that certain oomph, and I think the Bay Area’s done as good a job as it can do.

(Ed. to add: My husband’s offer letter for the job here promised, in writing, “No home delivery of snow.”  We were shoveling snow higher than the top of our garage–sold!  Take it!  We did.  But our kids missed out on the whole build-a-snowman or make-a-snow-angel experience, which left me a little wistful at times.)

Marlene sparked this one.  I didn’t have a lot of birthday parties either growing up; December’s a busy time of year, and we weren’t all that big on getting around to doing them anyway.  But there was a memorable one when I turned 12.

My folks one year had found someone selling kits with molds and plaster of paris and paint for making your own Christmas ornaments: add a snip of twine for the hook to hang from, add water, pour, tweak twine, dry, and decorate as desired. (Come to think of it, candy molds would work for this, although they’d be small.  Flexibility for the sake of the unmolding is helpful.)

Those molds got used for years, long after the original plaster supply ran out.  Sometimes (usually as we got older) we painted our names across the backs.  We glued glitter, we debated the merits of traditional red/green colorways vs going for broke and using them all.  We painted in the lines created by the molds, or not.  Remember–we were the children of a modern art dealer.

You could see the progression in the growing collection of young child to creator of ornate perfection.  Part of me thought, in protest, but this isn’t what my friends’ trees look like, struggling with the pride in, hey, this isn’t what my friends’ trees look like!

Mom and Dad had a cathedral ceiling in the living room, and we cut our own trees at a tree farm every year.  Writing about those trees could be a whole book to itself, but the best was the time we got one just too tall even for that ceiling and Dad decided to cut off the top and put it on the roof, so that to people going by looking in the window, it looked like this huge pine was growing right through the house!  Like I say, my dad has a sense of humor and a delightful bit of the imp to him.

We had a lot of space to fill up with ornaments given how big those trees were.  The collection grew.

And that one year, when I was almost a teenager but not quite, my mom molded a whole bunch for my friends to decorate at my birthday party.  Paint, the smell I had come to love of fresh plaster, glitter, glue, with multi-festival-able ornaments amongst the Christmas ones for my Jewish friends, and then everybody got to take their works of art home to show off (and my friends too now got to have homemade plaster of paris ornaments made by them at their houses)…

Best. Birthday. Party. Ever.

Channon’s comment sparked this one.  She and I wrote back and forth, with me going, eh, who wants to hear more about lupus, and her encouraging me to go ahead even when I said I can’t skip that part, it’s integral to the story. So here goes.

When it was first diagnosed, my kids were 2, 4, 6, and 8, and barely that.  I found myself suddenly being told I was not to go in the sun anymore.  Right. Like how am I supposed to adhere to THAT forevermore!?  Besides, I’m an outdoors type.

My arthritis was severe enough then (it isn’t now) that they tested me for Rheumatoid, and throw in this, that, and the other, and I was just plain having a hard time.  Not to mention, my mom’s cousin had died of lupus a week before her wedding date.  Cheers.

So.  Richard decided he needed to do something about all that. The lupus he couldn’t fix.  (The Crohn’s later was LE cells branching out.)  He wanted to cheer me up.  So he called a number of our friends and they all threw me a surprise half birthday party.

When they all yelled, “SURPRISE!” I was going, What?  What is this? A surprise party? But this is June!  My birthday’s in December!… Huh?  Well, oookay.  Chocolate and friends, who’s complaining.

There was a cake: half a 13×9 sheet cake, baked and artfully decorated by our friend LaRee with the words

Hap

Birt

Ali

on it going down the cake.  Which was dark chocolate.  Yum.  And a very good time was had by all, with much laughter.  My husband’s a genius.

Turns out, LaRee had had the same initial reaction to Richard’s proposal but had been perfectly willing to go along with it, and hey, let’s party!

So, months later, it was going to be LaRee’s birthday.  I found out.  My chocolate torte (recipe in the comments here) was already well on its way to what it is now and I decided to bake her one, dark chocolate ganache on a nearly-flourless cake.  But I’m no good at writing with a tube, so when I surprised her with it, I gave her a card instead, with the inscription:

“Hap Birt Ali,” she said.  Happy birthday to you, too, she re-torted.

(And you know?  Somehow we all muddled through just fine.  And life is very good.)

It seemed a really good idea at the time.

Okay, back up.  Around here, we December babies at church have a December club: anybody who’s ever gotten, say, one earring for their birthday (*note to my little sister: I am SO looking at you) with a note saying wait till Christmas for the other half of their present understands why we old friends get together once a year.  Not to mention that it’s an excuse for a no-stress-all-fun party.  Anybody born in the 12th month who can get there is welcome to come, young or old.  We each unwrap a present we bought ourselves as we explain why we got that thing, sing “Happy birthday to us,” and have a potluck brunch and a grand good time.

In talking about why we got what we got, we get to open up about ourselves in ways the rest might not otherwise come to know.  Although.  Mike, if you ever get something that *isn’t* model-train-related, or Orville, that’s photography-related, we’re all going to keel over in surprise.  And if I get something that isn’t knitting-related, for that matter, the rest of them will.

So many stories out of those parties…  Conway asking a new member of the group, trying to make conversation, how many children she had.  I thought, Oh, Conway, don’t!…while her face clouded over and she stammered, “We got a…late..start…” Poor man, he had no idea.

Turns out she was about three weeks along with her miracle of a baby boy and had no idea yet. That innocent conversation had let us in to see her pain, making the shared joy later all the more intense.

And there was Virginia, the matron of the group, gone now.  She always had something funny.  A pig cookie jar with a sensor that oinked loudly when you opened and reached into it–I ran out and got one right after the party: I had young children, I could hear that thing across several rooms, hey, it made a great Mom alarm!

Somehow my children didn’t love it quite as much as I did.

One year Virginia got herself a mirror.  It wasn’t terribly big, and we were thinking, okay, a bit big for purse sized, but whatever.  She took it out of its wrappings very carefully, not letting us see the box, sliding it out against herself–that was odd.

Then she held it up.

And the canned laughter began. It had a light sensor in the back so that as soon as you lifted it up it set off the ha ha ha hee hee hee ho ho hooo in an endless loop till you put its back down flat.

My dad has a wonderful sense of humor.  I knew he would love it.  There was still time before Christmas, and again, I ran out to copy Virginia.  (I got my husband one too, which is why I could photograph it; it’s got to be ten years old by now and it still works.)

I didn’t want Dad’s mirror to break en route.  So I filled a plastic grocery bag with styrofoam peanuts and put it at the center and put the bag at the center of a box I was shipping to my folks.

Mom and Dad got it and thought, oh what a cool way to package things!  You don’t get obnoxious styrofoam bits all over the place when you try to pull the presents out of the box!  Dad carefully took that bag out and set it aside to re-use to pack his brother’s presents.

Come Christmas Day, I called my folks, dying to hear their reaction to it, and they said nothing. I finally said, Dad–did you like your mirror?

What mirror?

And then, Uh oh…  Um…  Let me call you back!

He went looking and found that bag still there where he’d been packing things up, somehow it hadn’t made it into my uncle’s box after all.  No surprises by then as he unwrapped it, but hey.

They held a dinner party not long after, and Dad quietly placed that mirror on a shelf a bit to the side to see who it would catch and whether they’d warn the next guy.

And boy, did it.  Good thing his friends have a sense of humor.   Yeah, I confess. I put him up to it.  But then, he could have bagged it.

————

*Ed. note: She was 11 at the time; I was turning 13.  I’ve forgiven her. Honest.  But I still get to tweak her–sisters’ rights and all that.

At church.  There was the new daddy proudly holding his tiny child at this season of celebrating the birth of the Babe.  There was the daddy of the twins, surprising me by telling me his boys were already 16 months.  How did that happen so fast?

There was an unexpected announcement that Ann was in a coma in the hospital.  My first thought was, she misses her son. She misses her husband, gone several years now.  And oh, how I will miss her–we all will.

But you never know.  She and I have compared tough-old-bird stories from time to time with a laugh.   You never know.  It might not yet be her time, and hope is a strong and tangible thing at the edges of life.  I wonder if the nurses at Stanford taking care of a tiny and frail old lady know who she is; I believe she was one of the original nurses there when the place was new.

They are rebuilding most of Stanford Hospital to enlarge it and to comply with the stronger earthquake codes, although I think they are keeping the beautiful architecture that faces the patients coming in the doors.

The old gives way, and the pages turn in the Book of Life.

But they stay attached at the binding.

This is Friday as I type. Well, sort of.  By extension.  I’m too wired to sleep (although, the time stamp’s an hour ahead of me.)  Anyway, my husband suddenly said to me tonight, Tomorrow’s your birthday and we have that thing at church going on then; would you like to go to Flea Street Cafe tonight?

Asking someone who eats if they’d like to go to Flea Street for dinner is like asking someone who knits if they’d like some qiviut.

Even when I saw the side door unlocked and thought in puzzlement, when did I do that? and locked it on our way out, it didn’t dawn on me.  Richard said later that he’d unlocked various doors three times and I had locked them all.

He managed to walk out just behind me so he got that last one after all, and quietly texted “going!”  He also got permission from Phyllis and Nina in case he needed it to persuade me–I did want to go to Kepler’s after dinner, but I really wasn’t up to it and he easily talked me out of it.

“SURPRISE!!!” The house was full of people.

Okay, I should have seen that one coming.  And I did wonder if someone would do something Saturday night. I most certainly didn’t expect them to do it Friday night.  I now understand why my husband kept trying to tell me all the way home that I was actually already 50, by any reasonable argument, while I was telling him he was just jealous that he was an old man while I was a youthful 40-something-er.  He even had the audacity to tell me that by Chinese counting I was 51.  Nuh UH!

I had no idea.  And they could tell, given what my kitchen looked like.  Not a clue.

A great time was had by all, and it is now Saturday, so I guess it’s true: I’ve tumbled over the hill and joined my sweetie into fiftytudinousness.  Thank you for the amaryllis bulb, Richard.  (Ed: Oh, wait, that one was from Alyson, I’ve been corrected.  Thank you, Alyson!)  Thank you for the flowers, Nina and Phyl. Thank you everybody for coming and for the cake and the veggies and the mulled cider and the chocolate and the apricot flan and the fruit pastries and the…

And you know? Richard passed on the dessert menu, but Jesse at Flea Street, after coming out to say hi to this pair of longtime customers, sent out four dark chocolate truffles anyway.  (Jesse! Those were the BEST EVER–THANK you!) …yes I ate my two, I couldn’t miss that, that’s part of why I skipped out on Kepler’s just in case, Crohn’s blahblahblah–SO worth it…

But my Richard said no to ordering dessert at Flea Street Cafe. THAT is when I should have been tipped off.  Totally.