I never explained why I started writing more detailed birthday posts for my family over the past year, but it’s because Doc and I had a friend who lost her mom to Alzheimers two years ago. During the funeral, our friend gave such a wonderful picture of who her mom was and what made her so special, and I thought, “I should do that for my loved ones while they’re still alive.” 

Let me tell you, though–after my mom got her diagnosis but before we learned that she could go through treatment, it crossed my mind that this actually could turn into a eulogy, and I told the universe that it better not. Thankfully, the universe listened, Mom turned 70 yesterday, and I’ll be writing more of these as long as I care to blog. 

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My mom is a born teacher. She taught me how to sew, she taught me how to cook, she taught me how to garden, she taught me how to take care of people. She volunteered at my elementary school for years and taught a lot of kids everything from critical thinking to how banks work. She knows so much and she tells you the right way to do it all. My younger self (and I bet her younger siblings) thought that was bossy, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that she just knows it all and I’d better listen to her, whether it’s what plants to grow or how to take care of cats.

She is, objectively, a beautiful woman.  You don’t realize that about your mom as a kid and then as a teen you’re more concerned about what the world thinks of you (teens are assholes), but she is stunning. People meet her and say, “She reminds me of Diane Keaton.” As she ages, that bone structure just becomes more and more apparent and she gets more and more striking. Even at the hospital last month, she had the residents and young doctors making excuses to come check on her and acting goofy.

She took such pains to make sure her kids could be creative: art supplies, acting classes, twenty years of music lessons. If you asked her, she would say that she isn’t creative at all, or that “your father’s the artist”–but if you looked at how she combines colors in her garden, or how she dresses, or how she decorates her home, you would see someone with an incredible eye for color and proportion. An artist.

She’s a remarkable woman. Much like “creative,” I don’t know if she would say she’s “strong”–but over the last six weeks she’s kept the family together, even as we try to step up and take care of her. When she thanks me for taking care of her, I can only tell her, “I learned from the best.”

I learned it from you, Mom. Happy birthday.

It’s Doc’s birthday tomorrow! So he gets a birthday write up today.

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I still think the nickname–and the entire Steinbeck quote–fit him nearly perfectly: His sympathy has no warp. He is gentle as hell. He loves finding out how things work and explaining them to you, too.

He’s a quiet man; I don’t think his teachers in school recognized what they had so he’s usually not the first to speak up. But when he does, it’s always insightful and with such a sly sense of humor. You have to be fast to keep up with his connections.

He loves truth. He is passionate about fairness. He will give you endless opportunities to do the right thing–and he’ll try to understand why you’re not doing it in the first place. His patience almost limitless, for nearly anything except deliberate cruelty. Even then I’ve never seen temper from him; just disappointment.

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In the long Ann Druyan interview I quoted from a couple months back, she talks about Carl Sagan’s power of persuasion, convincing a creationist he was wrong:

“It was only because Carl was so patient and so willing to hear the other person out. He did it with such kindness and then, very gently but without compromising, laid out all of the things that were wrong with what this guy thought was true.”

That is Doc. So it seems appropriate to end this with another Sagan-related quote: “In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch”…with Doc.

It’s my sister-in-law’s birthday today so I wanted to write about her.

Sadly, I think she’s used to people underestimating her–she’s a literal rocket scientist, a small blonde woman in a male dominated field. She’s uncomplaining about that (and everything else) but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it.

It’s made her a fighter, and she’s so driven. She is extraordinarily strong, mentally and physically (my late grandmother called her “a hard worker”–there was no higher praise) and she is relentlessly focused on her goals.

She’s also extremely sensitive–to truth, to people doing the right thing, to what makes a good life, to beauty.

She’s the family breadwinner and has had to put up with a bad work environment for the sake of everyone else. (I’ve done that with only myself to win bread for, and it’s no fun.)

She can sew a Halloween costume, bake a cake, teach her son manners, train for a marathon, and plan how to get to Mars. Her name is the name of a star, and that mix of etherealness and the raw cosmic power that is also a star  pretty much sums her up.

Happy birthday, Altair!

My big brother is 41 today!

He has such a wide range of deeply practical knowledge (car repair, agriculture, how things are made, how trains work, what specific aircraft is in the sky above him) and esoteric stuff that still surprises me after all these years (what was carried on Apollo 11, piano jazz, the chemistry of rocket fuel…)

He’s curious and so smart, and when he wants to learn about something, he learns everything there is to know about it and then that info is ready for when someone idly says, “I wonder how x works…”

Much like my dad, people just kind of assume he’ll know things and come to him for help. He’s incredibly generous with his time and resources in the neighborhood and with his friends and family.

He’s a great cook who does Thanksgiving dinner for us every year. He gets excited like a little kid about anything mechanical, fast, or big. He’s the stay-at-home dad to Skyler, and best of all he’s teaching him to be as curious as he is.

Happy birthday!

The woman who brought birth control to the US was born today in 1879. From The Writer’s Almanac today:

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She said, “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” She died in 1966, at age 87, a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples.

Just…think about the date of that Supreme Court decision for a minute, and then be grateful to Margaret and every other progressive movement of the last 52 years.

It’s my dad’s 70th birthday today so I wanted to write a little about him. He’s a true Renaissance man, the kind of person you can count on to know any trivia and have the skills to do anything. Both my brother and I have taken full advantage of this (with basement storage, bird gazebos, garage shelving, pergolas…) without really thinking about how cool it is he knows just the right way to do something, or how much work it might be to do it.

As you get older, you get to know a parent like a person and not a parent. So now I realize how much work and worry and effort went into all those effortless-looking, beautifully drafted plans for pergolas and shelves. I know how hard it must have been for him to stick with an unfulfilling job for so long, just to make sure his family had what they wanted. I know what things will make him anxious, because they make me anxious, too (strangers, places you haven’t been before, social events).

When I read this passage in Across the River and Into the Trees years ago, I thought, “This is my dad.”

“He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.”

When you get my dad to smile, you feel like you’ve accomplished something. When you get his approval, you know you have the approval of a man who holds himself to the highest possible standards and expects the world to do the same.

He does not waste money. He does not swear. He is not weak, mentally or physically. He does not give up. And I’ve been able to make him smile sometimes.

Happy 70th birthday!

She is 101 years old today and still going strong, much like Ramona Quimby and Ralph S. Mouse, my favorite characters of hers.

Thank you and please stay healthy. (Via)