Birthdays Can Be a Pain, But Spring Is in the Air

When I woke up on my 35th birthday I was more than a little distressed to experience pain in my right hip, a pain I had never felt before. The pain vanished the next day. Being no stranger to pain of unknown origin, and being a hypochondriac of some repute as defined by friends and family, I took my temporary condition in stride. The pain in my hip has not returned.

Now, 31 years to the day later, I awoke last Friday not with pain in my hip but with a sharp pain in my lower right back, along the waistline, a pain I have suffered through before but not lately. Gilda has told me it’s arthritis, that stretching exercises would ameliorate much of the agony. Do I listen to her? Not exactly. 

It’s not that I’m a glutton for pain. It’s not that I don’t trust her. It’s just … I’m lazy. I hate exercising, and I suffer the consequences. The pain has persisted over the weekend, with occasional respite. 

I wasn’t the only object feeling my age Friday. Reluctantly, I finally had to jettison the Macbook I received when working on Chain Store Age and purchased when I retired. Seems a mid-2007 operating system, even upgraded to the maximum, isn’t compatible with today's real and future tech world. 

Reality came crashing down on me when I tried to load a disk of TurboTax. My upgraded system reached its limit at OS X. v10.6.8. TurboTax required at least 10.7.5. So my birthday present to myself was a new MacBook Air. Of course, the MacBook Air doesn’t have a disk slot, so I have to buy a stand alone disk drive, but isn’t that par for the course, any time you change hardware? You’re always forced to buy more than you expected.

I’m getting used to the new laptop but one major problem is I can’t seem to connect it to the HP printer. This is why I dislike new technologies. There’s always something that doesn’t work right. I’m not a happy camper.

Spring Is in the Air: Take heart all who have had enough of winter. The first harbingers of spring have appeared. No, I am not referring to red-breasted robins. Rather, I have spotted and quickly disposed of two silver fish, no doubt on separate expeditionary missions for their subterranean colony. It is just a matter of time, and melting snow, before we see lawns again.

As for melting snow, it is dropping in chunks from our highest roof to the level below. 

In case you’re wondering, we still haven’t gone live with solar panel electricity. The city has approved the installation. We’re waiting for ConEd to sign off to flip the switch.

In case you’re further wondering, when it snows the panels get covered just like ordinary roof shingle. Light snow doesn’t impact production but heavy accumulations probably will. But snow clears away from the panels sooner and tends to clean the panels, making them more efficient. Also, snow on the ground reflects sunlight, giving them more solar exposure. 

Of course, that’s all conjecture and prayer. I can’t wait to go live and find out (though I’d be content to wait until next winter to test the snow thesis).

65 And Happy For It

I turned 65 today. No cause for concern, though I will admit I stayed under the covers till well past 9 am. By a stroke of work scheduling good fortune, Gilda had off today. She lay under the covers with me. Couldn't ask for a better start to my birthday.

I think my 65th birthday has had a greater impact on my sister. She called this morning to say she's okay with being two years older but it's the thought of having a younger brother who is 65 that is truly mind-rattling.

No deep meanings or messages intended today. No thoughts for eternity. Just an appreciation that life is good. No need to rush to acquire more. And then again more.

Just an enjoyment of little serendipities. I took Gilda's car to the Splash car wash this morning. As I was about to hand over my charge card I noticed a sign proclaiming car washes are free on one’s birthday.

We ate lunch at Harvest on Hudson along the Hudson River in Hastings. Under a bright sun the river sparkled. Did you know, at that point in the river, ice flows north at a fairly rapid clip? I indulged in a dessert because it was my birthday, I told the waiter. It took a long time for the dessert to arrive, but when it did we understood why. The pastry chef had inscribed Happy Birthday in chocolate script across the top of the plate.

The rest of the day we spent shopping. Those who know me well know that's one of my favorite pastimes. I was lucky to work for a magazine on retailing that allowed me to infuse my avocation with my vocation.

The morning I turned 35 I awoke to a pain in my right hip. It lasted several hours, never to return. Perhaps just a subliminal message that I had reached a milestone in my life, no longer young, not yet old. Hard to believe our son Dan is 35. 

Lately, my lower back has bothered me. Gilda says it’s because I don't stretch enough. Guilty. And my feet suffer from peripheral neuropathy, making wearing shoes highly uncomfortable. Today, neither my back nor feet bothered me. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Remembering Birthdays Past

Spent the weekend in Massachusetts for Finley’s fourth birthday. Twenty-two kiddies, more than half girls, and about 20 adults entertained by a guitar playing children's singer. Outdoor play followed by the music, birthday cake and then free play in a carpeted basement with more trucks and trains than Ford, GM and Chrysler combined. A fun time for all, but as Gilda presciently noted, probably the last time until Finley’s bar mitzvah there will be so many girls at the annual festivities.

I can't remember all of Dan’s birthday parties though several of them stand out in my memory. There was the one when he was five, in our old house. Dan wasn't the most adventurous of small children when it came to animals beyond our three cats. So I was a little bemused when Gilda booked a visit by a menagerie from the Greenburgh Nature Center. The highlight was when Dan was somehow talked into permitting a snake to slither around his body. 

Before his next birthday we moved to our current home. One year we engaged one of his baby sitters, the son of a United Nations official from either Nigeria or Ghana. Whatever. The point is, the lad was a budding magician. Poor fellow ran into a most unappreciative, even disruptive, audience of boys. Whenever he’d attempt to do a trick, at least one youngster would cry out he knew the trick and its secret. They were so dismissive that we had to stop the performance in midstream.

We had to fill time till the parents came to retrieve their Dennis the Menaces, so Gilda took them outside for a good old-fashioned tug-of-war. As luck would have it, the ground was moist. The losing team was dragged through the mud. Most parents went with the flow when they arrived to find their “darlings” in soiled clothing. One father, however, would not let his son into his new Cadillac unless he was wrapped in towels. 

Dan’s most memorable birthday party was his 11th. He asked if he and six of his friends could have an “all-nighter” on Saturday. We agreed, reasoning to ourselves the boys would surely fall asleep by 2 am. We’d take turns staying awake till then. 

A good plan goes awry when the “party-of-the-second-part” (that is, the boys) do no adhere to your script. They did not fall asleep at 2 am. Nor at 3 am, 4 am, or 5 am. By 6 am, Gilda decided she’d make lemonade out of this lemon of an idea and take the half dozen boys on a trek in nearby Saxon Woods Park. (I, by the way, had gone to sleep at 2 am. Gilda had pity on me and never woke me up for my watch, not even when she took them on the hike.) 

The boys came back shortly before their parents arrived to take them home, exhilarated by their achievement and ready to impolre their respective mothers and fathers for a similar experience. We heard later than one set of parents enforced a 2 am curfew on their son’s “all-nighter.”

Dan’s birthday triumph did not end when his friends went home. An hour later he was to start in goal for the first time for his traveling all-star soccer team. The weekend before, when Dan was a defenseman, the team played a tournament in Yonkers. In each of the four games they had surrendered more than 10 goals. Now they were to play a strong team from Rye, led by the coach’s son whose name (not sure if it was his first or last name) was Winchester. 

I worried how Dan would respond to the new challenge, especially since he had not slept since Saturday morning. The game was tense. Each time Rye controlled the ball, its coach would be screaming for Winchester to make a play. Midway through the second half, Winchester blocked a ball at midfield and took off in pursuit of the sphere as it bounced toward the White Plains goal. There was no one between him and Dan. 

Time for a slight digression. You should know that as a defenseman, Dan had been among the most polite. If he and an opponent contested a ball, he was generally content to allow the other team to come away with it, reasoning, no doubt, that someone else on his team would get the ball back before a goal could be scored. Of course, by the scores of the previous games, that usually did not happen. 

But now, he was the only one standing between Winchester and the goal. He made a decision not to stand his ground. He charged at the ball. Like two knights on horseback charging at each other, Dan and Winchester converged, crunching together. The slightly larger Winchester kept going straight toward the goal, but Dan had succeeded in diverting the ball to the sideline. Though he had been run over, he had saved a goal. 

I don’t recall, seriously, I don’t remember, if Dan’s team won that game, but it was that play that transformed him into an all-star goalie in more than name only. 

On This day

It's my birthday today. Please, no cards or presents. No Twitter or Facebook shout-outs. (Some of you got up earlier than I did so you already sent me birthday greetings. Thank you. It really is appreciated.) I bring up my birthday because for years I would tell people my birth date was significant because it coincided with the fall of the Alamo.

Now, however, I can relate another momentous occurrence—March 6, 1944, was the first successful daylight bombing attack on Berlin by the 8th Air Force.

The other day Gilda and I, with Gilda's sister Barbara and her husband Alan, visited the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ. It's a fabulous museum, rivaling if not exceeding the new Smithsonian Air & Space Museum outside Washington, DC. What distinguishes the PASM, beyond its diversity of aircraft, are the knowledgeable and personable docents.

As we walked into Hanger #5, known as the 390th Memorial Museum, we were greeted by Richard Bushong. It was March 3. Richard told us 67 years ago to the day he was co-piloting a B-17 bomber on the first attempt by the 8th Air Force to penetrate Berlin's defenses. Bad weather scrapped the mission that day, and the next. But on March 6, the then 20-year-old Bushong and his crew of nine other airmen bombed Berlin. Eight hundred and twenty-one B-17 and B-24 bombers took off from England. Sixty-nine planes never made it back across the Channel. The 390th Bomb Group lost just one bomber while shooting down 27 German fighters.

A lanky Ohioan even at his advanced age of 87, Bushong served in the air force into 1971, flying F-4 Phantom jets in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel.

It is a remarkable experience to listen to history from someone who lived it first-hand. If you've ever seen a war movie of WWII bomber missions (films like Catch-22 or Twelve O'Clock High), you know the side gunners on the planes stood at open cutouts so their guns could swivel easily. With winds whipping by at 190-210 miles per hour, Bushong related, temperatures inside the plane plummeted to 30 to 50 degrees below zero. The crew wore electric suits under their sheepskin jackets and pants to keep from freezing. Just hearing about the cold made me shiver in the warm Arizona climate.

Aside from my birthday link to his historic exploits with the 390th Bomb Group, we share another common date, sad for him, happy for me. While laid up in hospital (a reaction to some bad food), Bushong's plane and crew were shot down. It happened December 16. That's a happy day for my family, the day Ellie was born.