A Rare Occurrence

I thought I'd show a picture of my daughters and I because it's a rare occurrence for us to all be together. I'm sorry this picture if a big blurry it was taken with a new camera before we got the hang of letting the auto focus do its thing.

Leslie, on the left, was here for a week from California, her birthday was in the middle of that week. I'm not telling her age but the next one if a big one. My birthday follows in a couple of weeks now and then Rachel's [on the right, of course] is a month later. We're all getting old enough that we don't announce the numbers. I figure I'll wait until 90 to announce the number proudly -- that is well in the future. And I'm not tattling on them either.

I was chatting with a couple of women this morning -- all over 60 -- and we all agreed that numbers actually tell nothing about the age we are. I'll be pondering this subject in greater depth in the next couple of weeks. After all I started this blog to hold myself to a certain level of truthfulness. But fudging is always a temptation that I sometimes give in to.

Not Gone in Spirit

I have been gone because my computer has been in the shop -- it's screen started going black intermittently. I've often not purchased extended warranty contracts for mechanical things but in this case I did and I'm glad. All seems to be well and I've found a friendly Mac store very close by. I might learn how to make an actual web site in the next few months.

In the meantime I've had a birthday and received, mostly coincidentally, some lovely gifts from my Swap-bot friends [and other lovely gifts from family]. The picture above was a gift that arrived the day before my birthday but I didn't actually find it at my door until the morning of THE day so there was all those lovely fat quarters -- all have wonderful touches of metallic which I love. Plus a big handful of selvages which couldn't have been more timely as I had just started another selvage quilt -- photo in a day or two. Plus there's a box of flower headed pins which are so great for some quilting projects.



It was a lovely day that included my youngest grandson's graduation. The only negative of the day was that the tent under which the graduation was to take place had accidentally been taken down the evening before so tubes of sunscreen were passed around to those gathered on the green of a park beside Hyannis bay. I used sunscreen liberally on exposed neck and shoulders but still got a lot of red. Felt sorrier for a few bald guys, they must be suffering these days.

While without a computer I used Rachel's a couple times just to check messages. But I decided to use the time to forge ahead with my list of quilts to make to use up stash -- so I sewed a lot. Perhaps the sun will come out tomorrow -- after a brilliant appearance Sunday the sun let the clouds take over. I hope to get some photos tomorrow.

Another year older

It happens every year and try as I might I can't ignore the day although I tend to treat it like every other ... sort of. I did make a point of going to my favorite local Chinese restaurant for lunch. So far I've resisted going to the self-styled "European" bakery nearby for a slice of cheesecake. But I hear a sort of siren song urging me to go have a piece with some capuccino. In my heart I KNOW I cannot be the age one would calculate from the year I was born. I KNOW it's been a long time since I was this hair-ribboned three year old, but it can't have been THAT long.

When one's last name is Calender, one is stuck with noting the flow of the years. Like Prof. Cox said back in American lit, "our names influence us in ways we don't even realize." [How sorry I feel for the famous Miss Ima Hogg!] And yet I am bad at remembering exact years; it's as if I have been given license by my name to contain all the years in an indiscriminate jumble. What year did X happen? I don't know. I know, like most Americans, exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard JFK had been shot but I don't know what year it was. I have not yet forgotten the year of 9/11, that is too close, too intimate. But what year did I trek in Nepal to Thenboche to see the Mani Rimdu festival? I remember most of the ups and downs of the trails, the rope bridges, the sight of Everest on the horizon, but the year is simply not important. I forget the years my daughters were born and the same for my grandchildren. That kind of forgetfulness has nothing to do with their importance but with the relative unimportance of this arbitrary thing we call time, and most of all the even more arbitrary way we number years. How ridiculous the millennium madness was! Whose millennium? I kept asking. Why was that year different than all other years? In fact, it wasn't.

And, in fact, I am not older today than I was yesterday. I refuse to be that old and I will not truly celebrate another birthday until I reach a nice round 80 ... and I reserve the right to change that to 90 if I should wish as the year approaches .... sometimes way out there in the oh, so distant future.