Another Birthday Comes and Goes ...

Good Lord! So much has happened in the past week and a half! Hopper’s been so busy and has had so much going on that I haven’t even had time to walk or throw the weights around, eat clean and keto, get the girls to school in the morning, or even read, for that matter. Well, I still kept reading, if only late at night after everyone’s gone to bed.

Over the past eight or nine days, Hopper celebrated another revolution around the Sun, started a new job down here in the Lone Star State, and had a run-in with the big bad old Covid. More on the last two in the next few days. Here I want to talk about my birthday, as I generally do this time of year.

The girls made it fun and special. You see, Patch turned thirteen the day before I turned, well, several decades older than that. But imagine that! She was just a tiny little fetus still in her mom’s belly when I started this blog, barely past a tadpole on the evolutionary ladder, though ensouled she was. And it was a great blessing for me, for I tend to shun the limelight. Her birthday celebrations now overtake and overshadow mine.

For her we went to that sushi place in downtown Dallas not too far from Dealey Plaza. The girls did not pound as much raw fish as they did back in the beginning of August, and I switched entirely to a tame Chicken teriyaki and washed it down with two IPAs. We all had fun, and when we got back home she opened up her presents and put on quite a show for us all. For my part I bought her a new copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a used copy of Dean Koontz’s Lightning. She read a couple of Koontz books in the past couple of months, and I recall enjoying that fantasy-mystery-thriller when I read it back in the late ’80s. As for Dracula, I decided to read it this Halloween (never having read it before) and she agreed to read it with me, akin to something of the bonding we did two years ago over The Count of Monte Cristo.

The next day, my birthday, was one of my last days of unemployment. We let Patch take the day off from school, too, since she has worked very hard, maintaining an above 90 average and doing very well on her volleyball team. So the two of us tooled around in the morning. We hit one of my favorite chains down here, Half Priced Books, where I scored my copy of Dracula and a gnarled, yellowed slim paperback on the German V-2 project during World War II, written by a German general and published in 1954. I am pretty excited to read both.

I let her pick lunch and she chose Boston Market. We did a few other errands but what was more meaningful was the conversations we had in the car: important ones, about life, philosophy, career choices, nostalgic reflections on the past. It was a day I’ll remember for a long time.

Of late I’ve been asking to be let alone my birthday afternoon to watch a classic SF movie. It started with The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was followed in subsequent years by Dune and Fantastic Planet. This year I chose 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it and it’s quite different in style and tone from later Trek films. Plus the girls have been really digging on Shatner and Nimoy’s songs. You know, that whole ironic / sarcastic millennial thing. The movie held up, and I enjoyed my return to the Enterprise.

The Mrs. made her version of my mother’s “lazy lasagna,” a childhood fave of mine, and the four of us ate at the dinner table. They let me, the birthday boy, choose the music, and I had Alexa play assorted Rush. That didn’t last long, and by the third song the little teen-aged ones commandeered our home spying slash music device.

How did Hopper do gift-wise? As always, pretty darn good. Patch gave me a $25 gift card to Half Priced Books, and my mother-in-law got me a Visa gift card. Little One gave me a hand-written gift certificate for me and her to do a night sky tour with my telescope – “One time only!” she emphasized. (It should be noted here that she is taking a class in Astronomy over at the high school.) My mom sent a card with $20 in it “to buy a chicken parm,” and I’ll probably get to that first afternoon I have off.

My wife did an admirable job, also as always. A bag of well-needed clothes, in this case, pants and shorts. Then, tickets to see the Dallas Stars hockey game on October 7 (forgive me uncle if you are reading this). Finally, she bought me this book:

 

It has become my latest obsession. More later, in a detailed post.

Anyway, such was Hopper’s celebration of the earth entering the same part of its orbit it occupied when I entered the earth, kicking and screaming, many, many revolutions ago.