It's good to be Queen!

As I think I may have mentioned a time or ten, I had a major birthday last week. In keeping with a tradition that Donna came up with a few years back, I got to celebrate it with a "Birthday Week of Fun," or most of a week, anyway.

I started on Friday, three days before my actual birthday, by declaring that I couldn't cook dinner because it was my Birthday Weekend. (As the Birthday Queen, I also couldn't be the one who had to go fetch the Good Food Store sandwiches, or wash the minimal amount of dishes.)

On Saturday, we went to Donna's in Portsmouth (I shouldn't have been required to drive, of course, but since Tony had just started a new heart medication, the label of which says, "May cause dizziness" and "This drug may impair the ability to drive or operate machinery--use care until you become familiar with its effects," it seemed best that I take the wheel). Annie and Katrina took the bus up from Boston, and we all went out with Donna and Jerry for a wonderful lunch at Mama Rosa's. Then there was cake (and my favorite, Friendly's buttercrunch ice cream) back at Donna's, and lots of presents. Whoo-hoo!

On Sunday I got to spend the whole day lounging around the house in elastic-waist pants. (Is there anything better than a day spent lounging around the house in elastic-waist pants, especially if you can be reasonably sure no one is coming to the door, and if you are also consuming celebratory quantities of leftover birthday cake?)

Monday was my actual birthday and, sadly, I had to go to work. Not only did I have to go to work, but, because the town of Roxbury inconveniently decided to hold their town meeting on my birthday, and because it was my job to cover it, I had to work from 8 a.m. till 9 p.m. On my birthday. Booooooooo!

BUT...it wasn't all bad, because thanks to my coworkers, there was another birthday celebration that included More Cake. Yaaaaaaay!

I also got lots of emailed birthday wishes, many in response to the message Donna sent out containing a couple of classic photos:


I'm guessing the Halloween one on the left is circa 1961, and the one on the right is probably from spring of 1966 (and yes, I have a jacket full of kittens; I'm not sure what the cooler was for, but I suspect it had something to do with transporting the kittens...)



Update: Donna says the date on this photo is 1969...meaning that I was 10, not 7, but hadn't outgrown doing silly things with kittens.







When I got home at 9:30 p.m., in the cold, windy dark, there was a line strung across the kitchen, and clothespinned to it were a whole bunch of birthday cards.


I was pretty excited, because, although I wouldn't have been surprised to receive a few birthday cards (it was my 50th, after all, and I had been reminding people of that for almost a year), this was way over the top. Then I took a closer look and noticed something odd about the stamps on most of the cards--yikes!

Apparently, my brother Greg is the one responsible for turning a 1967 Christmas photo of me, proudly wearing my very first Red Sox cap (which was actually a plain navy blue cap with a red felt "B" painstakingly sewn to the front) and gripping my very first baseball bat (there was a card on the bat saying that it was from Carl Yastrzemski [by the way, how many of you can spell Yastrzemski without looking it up? I can, and I could when I was 8 years old, too] which I remember being both very excited and a little confused about, since I had asked Santa for a baseball bat, and I wasn't sure why Yaz, as much as I worshipped him, would be giving me a present). (Have you ever noticed that the computer keyboard has enough symbols--( ) [ ] { } <>--to allow even my digressions to have digressions? It's a wonderful thing. But I digress.)

Donna's card had this really cool sticker on it. Check out the Altoids box--this is the kind of thing she learned to do when she went to Computer Goddess school last fall. (I, on the other hand, am so much less than a Computer Goddess that I have no idea why the image that she sent, and I saved, shows George in his proper, brown color, but when I import it into my blog, he turns blue.)


I got cards from siblings, friends, nephews, nieces, my aunt, my uncle, and some long-lost cousins! They were full of good wishes ("I hope someone bakes you a cake!" and "How'd you get that old?") and lots of good advice ("Channel your inner imp," "It's OK to embarrass your kids," and "Don't melt the snow with hot flashes!"). Even better, because the post office decided (for no good reason, since the addresses were all correct) to reroute some of my mail through Lisbon and China (that's Lisbon, Maine, and China, Maine, although nothing would have surprised me), the birthday wishes kept on coming for a couple more days, helping me to stretch out my Birthday Week of Fun!

In fact, I'll be stretching the 50 fun out even further, since next month I'll be collecting Tony's present--a tour of Fenway Park with all the kids, or, as Tony calls it, "a pilgrimage to the family shrine." I've never had The Tour before, and I'm excited about actually getting to touch the Green Monster!

Some thoughts on turning 50 (!)

Tomorrow is my birthday. (Yes, me and Dr. Seuss.)

First, I can't begin to imagine how I got here. Not that I didn't know it was coming, because 50 is not one of those birthdays that sneaks up on you. When I was 27, or 33, or 42, I often couldn't remember exactly how old I was without stopping to do the math. That was back in the days when I could usually still remember what year we were in, and could still subtract 1959 from it in my head. (And I think everyone who has struggled with the concepts of basic subtraction and "borrowing" will agree that it's gotten a lot harder to do that in your head since the start of the new millennium. It's not just me, right?)

But 50 is not like that. The prospect of turning 50 has been hanging over me for a while now...sometimes like a happy little pink balloon that says, "Look at me; I'm 50, but I'm still playful and childlike and fun!" but more often like a black cloud, or a swarm of mosquitoes. Or maybe an anvil. Something that says, "Life is hard, and I don't see much hope for improvement," or "I thought I'd have all life's pesky details figured out by now," or perhaps "I have this sense of impending doom, like all my dreams are about to be crushed."

For months now, I've been thinking about all the things I haven't done yet that I always thought I'd have accomplished by now. I haven't written a book. I haven't become thin and fit. I've never found a job that both pays well and doesn't make me feel like the soul is being sucked out of me. I don't own matching dishes, nice underwear, or grown-up furniture. I've never learned how to keep a house clean, so the prospect of company always sends me into a frenzy of hopeless decluttering and self-flagellation.

Sigh.

The thought that's been hanging over me is that it's probably too late for a lot of these things, either because at 50 I feel that I'm officially an Old Dog, and some of these things feel like New Tricks--I mean, if I were ever going to turn into a great housekeeper, I think I would have done it by now--or because I'm beginning to believe they're overrated anyway. I still want to write a book (or two, or ten), and every spring I get a little burst of optimism about improving my fitness level. And God knows I still need to find a tolerable and better-paying job, since I'm probably going to be working for another 20 years. But the dishes, the underwear, the furniture? I guess I'm ready to let those go.

Even with all the feelings of impending doom, I don't feel 50. I'm not talking about physically (physically, I might feel 25 one day and 95 the next) but mentally. There are still times when I feel playful and childlike and fun, as if that pink balloon really were following me around.

Back when we were teenagers, Donna once said to me, "Have you ever noticed how some adults are adults, and some adults are just old kids?" Sometimes I feel like an old kid.

Anyway, here we go: five bad things about 50, and five good things.

First the bad:

1) Feeling like I really should be a responsible adult by now, and that maybe Peter Pan syndrome (remember, I'm not only a youngest child, but a youngest child by nearly ten years) is not so adorable anymore.
2) Insomnia--lately I've been waking up between 3 and 4 a.m. and not being able to get back to sleep, quite possibly due to...
3) ...Hot flashes and night sweats. Oh, and let's not forget chin whiskers--I always wondered why my mother kept a pair of tweezers in just about every room. Now I know.
4) Feeling irrationally angry and resentful a lot of the time. (Now, I don't want anyone reading this to start to wonder if, when I respond to your greeting with a socially appropriate remark, what I'm really thinking is, I would so like to hit you with a Nerf bat! Although that could very well be the case...)
5) Being easily overwhelmed by things I would have taken in stride a few years ago. (A few examples come to mind: college financial aid applications, dental appointments, snowstorms, grocery shopping, traveling more than 20 miles from home, holidays, deadlines, cooking dinner...you get the idea.)

And now, five good things about turning 50:

1) I feel like I'm finally on my way to being a little more assertive, something I've aspired to for decades.
2) I have a better sense of what kinds of things, to me, constitute a waste of time and effort (shopping, TV, chick lit, Brazil nuts) and I'm learning to avoid them without apologizing for it.
3) I have four wonderful, beautiful, nearly perfect adult children and (as far as I can tell) not a single one of them hates me.
4) Like New Year's Day, but in an even bigger way, 50 feels like a good time for new beginnings, for making resolutions, for finally figuring some things out. Hope has been a big theme across the country lately. So I'm hopeful, too.
5) Tony--who once wrote me a poem during the first year we were married, but whose written communication with me since has been mostly limited to notes left on the kitchen table ("Took dog with me") or text messages ("Where is pizza cutter?!")--wrote me a birthday poem, and read it aloud (in front of Donna and Jerry and three of the kids). It was mushy and sweet, and I was only slightly mortified, so it was worth turning 50 just for that.

Office Sunshine Girl

I am the self-appointed Office Sunshine Girl at the Rumford Falls Times, where I work (as I have been at every place I've worked since I was 19 years old and started giving out homemade holiday goodies at Bob's Corner Store). This means I get to make all the birthday cakes, and for our managing editor's 50th, I decided to make a special "good news only" edition of the paper. My frosting hand isn't as steady as it used to be, but, all the same, everyone seemed mightily impressed.