Birthdays

I had a birthday last week.  I turned 57 and I was born in ’57 - the year of the good Chevy.   In high school, three girlfriends and I snuck into the drive-in theatre in the trunk of a ’57 Chevy.   That was more than four decades ago and it’s still fresh in my mind.  The calendar may be adding up the years, but my brain is still right back there giggling with my friends in the trunk of that car.

When my son was very young I started teaching him fractions via his quarter birthdays so I’d buy him a cookie or some little treat every three months throughout the year.  We’d also measure him on the door jam to see how much he’d grown.  He just turned 15¾ and the day slipped by without my acknowledging it. He was disappointed I hadn’t said or done anything all day to acknowledge his three-quarter birthday. I’m trying to forget my annual birthdays and he wants one every three months.

Birthdays are a funny thing.  They force us to count up the number of years we’ve been on the planet and then that number puts us on a scale of young, middle-aged or old, but it doesn’t tell much else.

The one good thing about birthdays though, is that it is one day a year we are honored by people that love us.  Cards show up in the mail, sweet notes are written, calls come in from long-time friends.  It feels good to be remembered, even if we are trying to forget that one more number gets added to the tally.

Since I turned 18, I’ve made it my birthday tradition to go somewhere I’ve never been before.  I’m not much for parties, so I leave town and go exploring.  When I was working, I’d always take my birthday off.  These days, walking on a new trail in the woods satisfies the requirement as easily as the month spent in Australia the year I turned 40.

When my mother-in-law was alive, I used to send her flowers on my husband’s birthday.  It was my way of thanking her for giving him life and raising him up to be the man I wanted to marry.  Mothers deserve more attention.

Every year on my son’s birthday, I always wonder why he’s the one that gets the party, since I’m the one that did all the work the day he was born.  The party should be for me, since the work of giving birth was just the beginning of all the effort involved in raising him.

Perhaps we could start a new tradition around birthdays in America – one that doesn’t involve adding up numbers of years spent on earth, but rather number of pleasant memories, good friends and overall blessings in a person’s life.  If this were the case, I’d be much older than 57 and it would be a good thing.

  

Security

I’ve been through airport security checkpoints more than a few times this past summer.  Since May I’ve been on 22 flights to six destinations.  It always amazes me the number of Transportation Security Agents I see standing around in every airport.  Perhaps the Homeland Security folks feels this small army of personnel, with seemingly little to do, will intimidate the terrorists enough that they give up their efforts.  Those agents are certainly a stern bunch and they do a good job of intimidating me, but recently I encountered a few that actually had a sense of humor.

Gone are the days when we simply walked through a metal detector at the airport.  They now have scanners that emit Lord knows what through a body to be sure nothing is hidden in the crooks and crannies of a person’s anatomy.  I don’t trust those things so I always “opt-out,” which guarantees me a pat down by a well-trained female security agent.  I look at it as an opportunity to get a quick full body massage before I have to sit for hours on a flight and I didn’t even have to pay extra for it.  The downside is, the agent always spends more time telling me what she’s going to be touching and how she’ll be touching it, than actually spending the time touching those things, but I don’t mind.  It’s a much better option than whatever that machine offers and I’ll opt for human contact anytime.

So one time this very professional older agent started patting me down and when her hands came around the front of me I felt I needed to warn her I wasn’t wearing a bra.  I like to travel in comfort and a bra is about the most uncomfortable item of clothing on the planet.  The minute I gave her that warning, she told me to bend forward.  “I guess you know a thing or two about the ‘over 50’ female anatomy, huh?”  I said.  She actually broke her stern professionalism and chuckled.  She then did a thorough job of checking for explosives amidst certain sagging body parts.  There’s no telling what could have been hidden under there.  

Another agent pulled my son over recently because his backpack showed something suspicious.  We were college shopping on the East Coast last week and while there, we visited an Italian import store where we purchased five pounds of a special flour blended specifically for wood-fired pizza dough.  We have an outdoor pizza oven so we have need for it.  I guess the density of it looked odd on the x-ray machine so Kaleb’s bag endured additional inspection. 

After the agent pulled out the bag of flour, he rubbed a probe all around the outside of it.  I told the guy we had just purchased it at an Italian import store downtown and I sure hope the guys packaging up that bag were running a clean business, as I’d hate to be liable for whatever they had on their hands.  The agent looked at me and said, “Did you hear what you just said?  ‘Italian import business.’  They aren’t exactly known for running clean businesses, you know.”   Then he laughed.  So did I, once the drug and/or explosive test came back clean. Whew.  I needed more than a little massage after that momentary scare.

Progress

Inventions are a funny thing. I know the overall premise of inventions are to make life “easier” but they should come with a big disclaimer that they won’t necessarily save a person much time.

While I wouldn’t give up my laptop for a typewriter, I can’t even count the number of hours that “technical difficulties” have eaten up my days.  And just when I start counting on my cell phone to be a GPS device, the battery dies and I drive all over yonder wondering where the heck I am.

What kills me about such progress, especially in the arena of housework, is that for all the things that get invented each year to supposedly make cleaning house easier, housework ends up taking longer and longer because someone keeps raising the standard of “clean.”

I had great grandparents that grew up with dirt floors, so what’s the point of a broom?  When the dirt floors went away, a broom became vital, but then came the mop and now I am faced with anti-bacterial floor cleaner.  Do I really need to keep my floors free from bacteria?  I don’t even hold to the three-second rule.  If food hits my floor, I throw it out.  

Progressive inventions don’t just frustrate my house cleaning efforts – they’ve invaded my hobbies as well.  I love taking photographs.  I have shelf upon shelf full of photo albums I’ve been keeping since high school.  I’ve always used “instamatic” cameras, as the complexities of shutter speed, f-stops and apertures never quite found a place in my brain, so the “auto” feature on cameras works just fine for me.  But since photos went digital, which was supposed to be an improvement in my life, I’ve found I’m drowning in my own shutterbug stew.

Organizing and looking for photos has got to be the biggest time sucker of any activity I do, because housework just isn’t that high on my priority list. I take far too many photos. There are no less than 20,000 stored on my latest laptop, and that’s just from the last three years.  Trying to find a particular picture is a nightmare unless I can remember the date I took it. Right.

The one good thing about digital photos though, is not having to pay to get them developed, but that’s the bad thing, too, because then I take more photos.  Once I design and print out a beautiful “coffee table photo book,” then what?  Why keep the hundreds of photos that didn’t make the cut? But deleting them just seems too cruel.  I worry someday my brain won’t remember all the trips we took or what my sweet boy looked like at five years old, so I keep them, thinking they will entertain me in my senior years.

Wait, my senior years are here!  Now is the time for purging and getting rid of things I’ve been collecting for decades.  And I’m not just taking about the bacteria on my floors.  

Summer Vacation

When I was a kid, the first week back at school always started with writing the dreaded report about what I did over the summer.  We never did anything or went anywhere as far as I can remember.  No picnics, no camping, no vacations.  I begged my mom to go to Disneyland like all the other kids, but was just told, “Let’s not, but say we did.”

Perhaps this is why I love to travel now.  Sitting around doing nothing makes me crazy.   This is also perhaps why my son’s summer schedule doesn’t look anything like mine did as a child.  If I were to write a report about what he did this summer, it would look like this:

The week after school was out Kaleb spent a few days with a friend then we were off with 16 others to volunteer for a week at an orphanage in Mexico.  Kaleb spent most of his time painting.

On the way home from the airport, I dropped him off at University of Washington to attend a week long international conference for those who study the ionosphere, as he’s been doing research in this field this past year or so with a physicist from Johns Hopkins University (above).  They displayed their work and Kaleb answered questions about those findings.  I must admit, I’m pretty proud I have a 15-year-old “published” scientific researcher in my house.

The next ten days or so our family was preparing for the “Norwegian Invasion,” as we had 15 relatives come and stay for two weeks.  There was much cleaning and yard work to do to say the least. 

Our weeks with the Norwegians passed by all too quickly, especially with a jaunt to the Oregon Coast for four days in the middle of it all.  Days before I drove them to the airport, Kaleb and Kory were on their way to Boy Scout camp for the week where Kaleb learned blacksmithing skills and made some pretty cool stuff.

Kaleb missed his last two days of scout camp because I had to take him to a “Secret Sojourn” trip with the youth from our church.  They had no idea where they were going or what they’d be doing.  It’s good thing we are people of faith, as it took a lot of faith to let 30 kids go into the unknown with six leaders for ten days.

The group flew to Denver to work with some disadvantaged kids, spent quiet time in the Rockies talking to God, drove to Moab, Utah where they repelled off 120 foot canyon walls, spent two days river rafting and slept out under open heavens by the side of the river, which would have been very nice if it hadn’t rained so hard that night.  They drove to Las Vegas and volunteered at a thrift store then offered to pray for people who needed it.  They spent time in the desert in California praying for one another, then went homeless in Los Angeles for 24 hours so they’d understand a bit more about that culture.  It was a life changing experience for most of them and they all came home ever so thankful for little things like a hot shower and a soft bed.

Days after Kaleb got home from that trip, he entered a birdhouse he’d made for me in the Skagit County fair and won a blue ribbon.  Days later we were on a plane to Norway to visit family for a few weeks.  We bopped down to Poland for a few days to visit a concentration camp, as Kaleb’s taking world history this coming year and I thought it was important he experience that part of it up close and personal.

We are back home and summer is over and as a homeschool mom I won’t require any reports out of him, but I’m fairly certain when he grows up and has kids of his own, his ideal summer will just be sitting around doing nothing but reading books, and going nowhere. 

Bakeries

I try not to be a judgmental person, but I will admit that I judge countries based on the sheer number of bakeries I encounter while walking through their streets.

It saddens me greatly that America has lost its love for the main street bakery.  There’s nothing better than that first bite into a delectable pastry I’ve never experienced before or tearing off hunks of freshly baked bread and savoring every morsel.  I love countries where daily trips to the neighborhood bakery are the norm.

America, it seems, wants the convenience of one stop shopping and a bakery inside a grocery store just doesn’t cut it for me.  I want to gaze through the windows and see if the bakery holds promise.  I want a glass case where I can point to some yummy delight and ask for “one of those.”  I want shelves up to the ceiling containing breads of every kind imaginable behind the counter.  I was the waft of fresh baked bread filling my nostrils when I enter the place.  A coffee pot at the ready is always a bonus and if the bakery has outdoor seating on a sunny day, I’m just a little bit closer to my idea of heaven.

In my estimation, it’s worth a plane ticket to Europe just to have that full-on bakery experience, as they seem to do bakeries like no other continent I’ve visited.  Outdoor seating is usually on cobblestone streets.  Buildings are older and more beautiful than anything America has to offer - the architecture is pure eye candy.  Within earshot are street musicians who offer up their talents to anyone who will toss them a coin.  Life is literally and figuratively so sweet, near a bakery.

So it was for me last week in G’dansk, Poland.  I had a hard time passing up all the bakeries, as there were just so darn many of them.  Needless to say, I’m in love with that country.  I’m ever so thankful I am not gluten intolerant or too concerned about my weight.  It’s a good thing, too, as even walking through the tunnel under a major thoroughfare in G’dansk, I encountered not one, but five bakeries.  Under the street!  Five! I had to pass up at least four of them and it nearly killed me.  Of course, they didn’t offer the outdoor seating and cup of coffee that makes the experience so much more pleasant, but I was still quite happy to nibble away at a tasty treat as I headed for the bus station – American style – eating while I walked.

I know we have a few hometown bakeries, and I frequent them often, but it’s just not the same – mostly because they are attached to cafes that serve other food and distract from the main attraction – the bread.  Always, the bread.

What is it about bread that makes it such a fundamental part of nearly every culture on earth?  Certainly in the what-came-first chicken and egg scenario, bread came before bakeries, but in my world, bakeries come first, as bread bought in a bakery is the best way to start or end any day.