friday birthday wordplay ..!
Thank you, all my friends, for helping to make this life wonderful. Thank you!
Today is my birthday. I am 36 years old offically. How curious. I suppose I normally would go on a long ramble about life; how being 36 is both frightening and exciting … but today I will hold off. I won't even post a new poem, though if you have a birthday poem (it doesn't even have to be about me) I'd love to see what you'd want to share.
Anyway, this morning I woke up and stumbled downstairs to feed the noisy birds, wild cats that live in my garage and make coffee. The stray cats get fed in this big bowl I keep by the back door. They are still scared of me (or all humans I guess) but know around the right time of morning I usually stumble out to feed them and hide in the corners of the yard to wait until I have left their food and moved off to re-fill the bird feeder that hangs by my kitchen window. I usually get sparrows and grackles and other dirty-brown birds but there are also a family of tufted titmice (which is fun to say in mixed company) and a woodpecker and a junco which all look like small black and white birds of one shape or another but have fun being messy and knocking all the seeds to the ground so the fat squirrels can lazily gorge themselves below. All this time I have the coffee pot brewing the magic liquid that keeps me going … coffee-like sludge! I like my coffee thick like mud, that way I know I might not get a good breakfast but can eat my coffee if need be (plus I am usually awake by the second cup).
I am going to Columbus, Ohio, for the weekend. Who knows what adventures await me? They say it will be mostly cloudy and windy, tempratures ranging from 41 degrees to 54. Yum! This leads me into the other point I think I should make; there was no snow today as I opened my door and wandered outside. This might not be as exciting to you as it is to me, but the thunder storms last night seem to have brought in warm air and all the water melted the three feet of snow we had on the ground! Now the world is a muddy drab, and all the dead leaves and trash blown in from the neighbor's backyard that had been hidden under the clean white snow are visible for all to see. I think later today I will go out and pick the worse of it up. It is rather bedraggled looking, to be honest.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Happy B’day, Zack! And may your trip to Columbus be everything you expect–and more (tho for the love of me I can’t understand why you guys picked Columbus, or Ohio for that matter but that’s neither here nor there it’s your vacation so get outta here you crazy kids and have a good time, OK?)
Your friend,
The Guy Who Saw His 36th Birthday 14 Years Ago…
March 13th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Thank you, Sam! Shelby and I went to the Columbus Museum of Modern Art, about a dozen used book stores (my big weakness … if it has a poetry section I can literally spend half a day reading through the various books for sale, you never know what you’ll find) and had dinner at a Bali restaurant. All and all it was a delightful weekend. It’s not every day I get to spend a leisurely amount of time loitering about a fashionable and new-fashioned city, something with a night life full of dancing and beautiful people. I am not saying that my city, Lansing, is full of grossly overweight, out of fashion creatures, but Michigan does have the 4th largest amount of appalling obese people in all of America. It is sort of sad. But my weekend spent in Columbus, Ohio, was very different. It has charming hip neighborhoods full of neat art shops and bistros and cafes and restaurants of many different tastes. We stayed in Germantown, which was populated by (guess what?) Germans a hundred or so years ago. Now the neighborhood is full of cobblestone streets and brick two-story houses and corner grocery stores. The reason Shelby and I stayed there was a really cheap hotel/bakery called Juergen’s that seemed like the kind of adventure I was hoping to have. The owner, Rosemary, who probably was 90 years old but seemed to have the energy and humor of someone in their 60s, appeared delighted she had someone stay at her hotel. It had the kind of out of the way, run down atmosphere about it that suggested Rosemary didn’t get a lot of visitors to the hotel side of her business, though her European bakery was delicious! There is something delightful about waking up in the morning and having the smell of fresh bread rising up through the window.