birthdays

In winter's hibernation, things slow and drip and dry up ... and there are birthdays.

My stepmother reached 92, I believe, and informed me, with telephone evidence provided, that the toilets in her house had begun moaning. There was no need to touch the apparatus ... it/they moaned without interference or inspiration and she couldn't get to sleep. So there was the adventure of the moaning toilet(s). Fixed now.

My younger son reached 23 and is gearing up for a National Guard two-week-exercise followed by a 8-9 month deployment in one of America's undeclared wars against inadequately-defined terrorism. Now and then, the reality of it washes over me and, like other parents, perhaps, I feel a desire to kill anyone responsible for supporting a war in which he might be hurt. A hypocrite when it suits me? You bet.

My 77th birthday is next week and with winter inching by, I reread books I find pleasant (Thomas Perry adventure for one) and rewatch TV serials I like ("Peaky Blinders" eg.) because the people don't require knicker-twisting and yet can make me cry or laugh from time to time. In the obituaries, a nice guy who liked to be known as "Grumpy" because his deceased wife had dubbed him that died himself. I knew and liked him. He was up in his 90's. Patches of desire to take on and write about a topic come and go, but are so sporadic that I hesitate to re-don those threads. There is sunshine that gets tantalizingly warm from time to time, but it's still winter ... I'm old enough to know that. I use a nebulizer twice a day and remember like a mental bookend the fortune teller who said I would die between 83 and 85. The closer it comes, the more sensible it sounds, though I do perk up when a good conversation gets going. So much of the conversation centers on the latest U.S. president, Donald Trump ... what a shameful, shaming guy ... he is, in some part of me, a 'man worth dying for.' I apologize to my kids, but there's nothing I can do about it. They will have to confront the assholes I did not.