A Birthday to Remember

For reasons unknown, my Facebook feed seems to be managed by one of the stranger bots at the company. For more than ten years, I've received ads for socks. You'd be astonished to know the variety of socks out there. Regular socks, Happy Socks, compression socks, Bombas -- lots of Bombas, personalized socks where one can have one's cat's face all over the socks, religious socks featuring saints I've never heard of (but Lutheran's don't have a whole lot of those kind of saints that they recognize). I don't mind sock ads. I get it that FB has to have ads and ads for socks are far better than the ones for bras designed by 70-year-old grandmothers (?). For a while there I was getting ads for preplanning funerals and burial plots. I didn't care for them.

Beyond ads for socks and other things, there are the "you might like" things that show up. And they decided a couple of years ago that I might like pictures and videos of people wearing T-Rex costumes, particularly people thusly garbed meeting their relatives at airports.

Well, in this case, they were right. I did like them and I do like them. A lot. To the point that if I had a bucket list, I'd put on it "Meet a dignified family member at the airport while wearing a dinosaur suit."  I just love to watch those videos and picture myself there. Fortunately, (1) I don't have any really dignified family members (well, there's Doris, but she doesn't travel much anymore) and (2) people I know get themselves home, usually by train, when they fly in. So there's been little danger of this goal's being achieved.

I did somehow mention this whole thing to a relative with a better memory than I have. And apparently she filed it away for future reference. I did notice, though, that when she came home from a month-long journey to Australia this winter that she didn't happen to mention her flight number.

I had a birthday last week. Not one of those "significant" ones. That's next year. This was to be an ordinary birthday with the only hope that it would be better than Joe's most recent one wherein the dog tried to bite the vet, somebody picked a fight with him, and we all walked out of a restaurant due to poor service. 

The East Coast Cousins (to differentiate from dear Debby and Janet who live in California) gather approximately quarterly for a lunch or dinner at one of our homes. There's always a delicious group-effort meal and lots and lots of laughing.

We were scheduled to have lunch at Karen's (the one with the good memory) and since it was Groundhog's Day, we were delighted to be greeted by our hostess wearing a black formal suit and a top hat. She stopped short of pressing her small, fluffy white dog into service as a groundhog substitute, but we surely got the idea.

We feasted on quiches and salad and sparkling beverages and told stories, asked questions, and laughed almost the required amount. Then it was time for dessert and when Betsy went off to get it, she inexplicably needed a lot of help and so a few of us were left at the table to continue the conversation, which we didn't mind because Susan had just begun what turned out to be a lengthy report on the downside of the flower show.

And then they came in, bearing a cake, and singing Happy Birthday.