8 Birthdays: What a Wonderful Life

When I hatched this 8 lists of 8 concept, a quick little tote on my fingers confirmed that the last eight would be on my birthday. That's easy, thought I.

Turns out, I was wrong. It was nice to know where I was headed all week, but picking the top 8 of 58 wasn't quite as simple as I expected. I have had a lot of wonderful birthdays.

When I was a kid, being born on the last day of June meant never having to go to school on my birthday. Sure, it meant never having my mom bring cupcakes for the class on my birthday, but somehow, that trade-off always seemed worth it. Especially since my mom went all out for our birthdays, particularly in the cake category. I had a cake castle with a princess in a cake dress, a barn with coconut grass and animals, my brother had covered wagons, and a circus train, my sister had a jack-in-the-box for her first birthday, and there were all sorts of cats and Snoopys in between.

With all that in mind, the first entry on my list is a bit of a cheat-- it's all my birthdays before the age of 10 (which is an arbitrary number, but I have the sense that 10 is the age when my kid birthdays ended).

18

The year I turned 18, my family spent 2 weeks in a rented villa in Portugal at the end of which I headed off to London to be a counselor for a summer program at the English branch of the Swiss boarding school I had graduated from the year before. I spent my 18th birthday at Heathrow Airport, holding up greeting signs and shepherding kids on to shuttle buses bound for Surrey. No one knew it was my birthday, and I forgot it myself several times throughout the day. So this is what it's like to be an adult, I thought with sadness and pride. That night, as I played poker with the other counselors, there was a knock on the window, and there was my family-- my mom, dad, brother, and sister had rerouted their trip home to Saudi Arabia to spend the last couple hours of my birthday with me.

19

The year I was 19, I canceled my counselor job from the summer before to spend a summer term at college. One summer was a requirement of my university, and although I hoped to get an exemption, it was not a sure thing, and all my friends were planning on being on campus that summer. One boy in particular encouraged me to stay, and when I did, he was a constant companion. When he found out it was my birthday, he offered to take rent a canoe and take me fishing on the lake near our school. As we paddled about casting our lines unsuccessfully, he suggested I turn my back to the bow and keep fishing as he paddled us to a place he knew was lucky. Nearing the end of the lake, I heard a chorus of voices and turned to find all my friends singing happy birthday on a little beach.

 Not 24

"Are you going to write about the time Teresa and Elaine showed up and crashed your birthday?" my brother asked me this afternoon. "Because that was one of my favorite of your birthdays," he laughed.

Yeah. No.

40
and
50

Our whole family gathered for a week in Maine on both of these milestone birthdays. We hiked, canoed, ate lobster, and had an all out wonderful time. Just 2 more years 'til 60!

53

I've spent a lot of birthdays in Buffalo, where Heidi's parents live. Mostly, it has to do with summer travel and coordinating our visit with her brother or nephew. In 2015, I took matters into my own hands, organizing a trip to Jamestown, NY, birthplace of Lucille Ball and home of the Lucy Museum. Can you say Vitameatavegemin?

57

I flew out to Minnesota to spend time with my mom right after school ended last year. Heidi joined us on the 29th, and the three of us played games, went to the pool, ate at one of the best restaurants in the Cities, and walked around St. Anthony's Falls on The Mississippi River. It had been 7 years since I spent my birthday with my mom, and this would be the last time I'd ever get to do it. It was a great day.

58

Despite the restrictions of the pandemic, today was quite possibly the quintessential birthday for me; in fact, if my sister's family had been here, it would have been nearly perfect. I ate peach and blueberry galette for breakfast, worked on solving a murder box until 10, went over to my brother's for sandwiches (from Earl's!), games in the back yard with both my older nephews, and lemon cupcakes. Once home, Heidi and I closed all the curtains and pulled the recliing chair up to the TV to pretend we were at the movies. (We would have had popcorn if we hadn't been so full of cupcakes.) When the house lights came up on Troop Zero, I wiped a tear and walkeda up to water my garden. Then it was home for lobster rolls and corn on the cob.

I know, right?

8 States

Spending so much time at home encourages daydreams of traveling. In my life, I have been fortunate to see a lot of the world, and quite a bit of the United States. As of this writing, I have set foot in 48 states (Hawaii and Idaho, I'm coming for you), and I have spent time outside an airport or an interstate in 45 states, and I have actually spent more than a night in 39 states.

This is an amazing country, both topographically and culturally, and it's easy to see why people come from all over the world to visit. Even so, there are places that, for me, one stop was enough. Then there are the places I would go again and again.

These are my top 8 states:

Alaska

Alaska has a lot to live up to, and it does. It has the most beautiful mountains I ever seen outside of the Alps. Forests, glaciers, ocean, tundra, it is immense and amazing.

Maine

I first visited Maine in August 1995. We left hot and sticky Virginia to spend a few days with a friend on Mount Desert Island. I'll never forget the first day-- my friend showed us around the island and through Acadia National Park. Windows down we rolled along the ocean and through forests with the sharp smells of salt and balsam in air. "I hate it here!" I said. "It's too perfect, and I never want to leave, but I have to, so I hate it."

New Jersey

My family lived in South Jersey from the time I was 4 until I was 13. I loved my childhood there. Beaches in the summer, peach, blueberry, and apple picking, in the fall, snowy winters, and rainy springs with daffodils and lilac. I started school there, made my first best friend, learned to swim and ride a bike, and played soccer and softball.

South Dakota

On the eastern side, it's all farm land and prairie that rolls into the Badlands and the Black Hills. Looking out the car window, you can imagine cowboys riding up over the ridge to your right. It is gorgeous country, wide open and still untamed.

New Mexico

The Sandia Mountains make a half-circle around the flat, high plains that Albuquerque sits on. There is true dessert in all the other directions. Dry heat during the day gives way to cool nights, even in summer, and the stars!

California

Everyone knows Cali is amazing, from south to central to north. I can't imagine tiring of it.

The last two slots are sill open.

I think Virginia might make it, if I hadn't lived here for the last 37 years. One day, if I move away, I might long for the monuments of Northern Virginia, or the shores of Virginia Beach, or the splendor of the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially in autumn.

And New York i in the running, too. The City is exciting and vibrant, always worth a visit. My dad grew up in central New York, and I went to college there. The winters were grueling, but I honestly didn't mind. Heidi's folks live in Buffalo, and I've spent a lot of time in Western NY in the last 22 years. Niagara Falls? Incomparable, and the great lakes, Erie and Ontario, are, well, great. But, sorry NY, I just can't commit.

8 Sandwiches (plus 1)

"I don't think I've ever seen you eat a sandwich before," one of my colleagues remarked at lunch a few months ago; this after eating that meal together almost every day for at least three years.

"It's not my usual," I agreed, taking a bite of calabrese salami and provolone on pane di campagne. A couple of seconds in the microwave had softened the bread and warmed the meat and cheese so that no condiments were necessary. It was delicious.

My relationship with that workhorse of the portable meal is a bit fraught. I love a good sandwich, but it rarely occurs to me to go out of my way to eat one. Even that day, the only reason I had a sandwich for lunch was that there were no leftovers or salad fixins in the fridge. As a kid, I always wanted to buy my lunch, despite the fact that my mother packed fresh fruit and homemade sweets with every bag lunch. I think it must have been the sandwich, peanut butter and jelly (which I hate to this day) or bologna and yellow mustard, that I objected to. 

A notable exception was anything with cream cheese, which in our house meant cream cheese and olive or cream cheese and jelly, often my mothers homemade peach jam. I also think that the store-bought white bread of the day was another drawback; I clearly remember tearing the center of a slice away from the crust and rolling it into a gummy ball of dough which some kids liked, but most of us used as ammunition.

Outside the lunchbox, there were some sandwiches that were rare treats, restaurant-made as they were. For us, living right outside Philadelphia, we're talking incomparable cheese steaks and hoagies. A few years later, when we moved to Saudi Arabia, shawarma from a street vendor was always a satisfying, and late night ham and Bel Paese cheese sandwiches with mustard and mayonnaise from Angelo at the snack bar were a staple at my Swiss boarding school.

After college, I moved to Virginia Beach and The Jewish Mother was a fun place to go see live music. True to their name, they had an extensive deli menu, too, and if I was there, I loved Mother's Uncle Sam: turkey, avocado, and sprouts on pumpernickel. Another great sandwich down there was the Taste Unlimited roast beef and havarti with their signature dressing, perfect for packing a picnic to take to the beach.

These days, there's a roasted cauliflower with tahini and pickled beets that a little Lebanese takeout place up in Buffalo makes that I order every time I'm in town, and locally? It's Earl's chipotle turkey with bacon and  field greens. Can you believe I just figured out that they probably named that place Earl's after the Earl of Sandwich?

Yup.

So, to recap, here are my top 8 sandwiches:

Cream cheese and homemade peach jam

Philly cheesesteak

Italian hoagie

Shawarma

Ham and Bel Paese with pickles and mustard and mayonaise

Mother's Uncle Sam

Roast Beef and Havarti

Cauliflower and tahini wrap

Chipotle turkey with bacon and field greens on ciabatta

Oh? And in a pinch? I would enjoy that calabrese and provolone on pane di campagna, as long as it is gently warmed. But I can make that one myself.

8 Homegrown Vegetables

I have had a community garden for 10 years now. My how time flies! Most of the time I still feel like the novice new kid, fighting an endless battle against mugwort and wire grass, but I guess I've learned a few things, too. One of the most important lessons is that every season is different, and although I can do some things to help my plants thrive, most of it is up to them.

At this point in my agrarian career, there are eight must-have crops:

tomatoes
shell beans
okra
eggplant
peppers
corn
summer squash
winter squash

As reluctant as I am to leave my garden for vacations and family visits, coming back after time away and seeing how much has grown is always really exciting. It reminds me that we often lose sight of daily progress when we are right there.

I can't wait until Monday!

Eight Birds

I never paid much attention to birds growing up. My Aunt Sis would always call us to the back door of her Virginia home whenever she spotted a Cardinal or a Blue Jay, though, and I learned early that Robin Red Breast was a sign of spring. But beyond that, all birds with dark feathers were blackbirds and anything that swam on a pond and ate leftover bread was a duck.

I take that back: I knew what pigeons were, and still, on a high school trip, I bought a handful of corn from the vendor in the Piazza del Duomo so that I could hold a dozen of them on my outstretched arm.

Later, when I was in college, it was the bird feeder outside my Aunt Harriett's picture window by the kitchen table and the field guide on the sill that finally captured my attention and kindled my interest in birds. It was kind of thrill to be able to sort and name the birds that came for the millet and sunflower seeds. Chickadees, Nuthatches, Titmice, Sparrows, Wrens, Finches, Starlings, Mockingbirds, and Downy Woodpecker joined Cardinals, Blue Jays, Ducks, and Pigeons in my consciousness.

In 2006, I participated in the Northern Virginia Writing Project Summer Institute, an experience which changed my teaching and writing forever. One of the most popular books among our cohort was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Subtitled Some Instructions on Writing and Life, the book draws its title from advice Lamott's writer dad gave to her 10-year-old brother when he was overwhelmed by a report he had to write on birds: Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

All summer, we used those words as short hand to describe the best approach to any overwhelming task (such as teaching or writing or teaching writing): Get started and keep going, day by day, word, by word, student by student.

Here are 8 birds I've only spotted once or twice:

Indigo Bunting
Cedar Waxwing
Magpie
Common Loon
Kingfisher
Virginia Rail
Oriole
Screech Owl

But I'll keep looking!

Top 8 Radio, 1972

When we were kids, our car radio was always tuned to WFIL; they played all the top 40 hits live from Center City Philadelphia. Out on any errand, short or long, my mom, brother, and sister and I would sing along to every song.

The year I was in fourth grade, I got a clock radio for Christmas. I guess my mom must have thought that it was time I started getting myself up and ready for school, and what better way to start the day than listening to the radio? She was right about that-- even today my alarm wakes me, not to the top 40, but to NPR. Even so, that first year of having my own radio made a huge impression on me.

Whenever I hear a song from 1972, I'm transported back to that yellow room I shared with my sister. I am sitting on my bed, a homemade canopy contraption made with a plywood frame on the ceiling hung with dyed bed sheets on spring curtain rods. My night table is on the left, and the boxy white analog clock with AM radio is right under the little lamp.

Here's the list of my favorite eight songs of that year:

Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne
Candy Man by Sammy Davis Jr
American Pie by Don McLean
Brandy by Lookin Glass
Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast by Wayne Newton
Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens
Song Sung Blue by Neil Diamond
Heart of Gold by Neil Young

That was also the year I started buying my own records, and I owned the 45 of almost every song on that list!

Pie!

We brought a bag full of those Georgia peaches up here to Buffalo, and they are ripening quite nicely. So much so, that Heidi's mom decided to bake a peach and cherry pie for dessert tonight. It was a warm and satisfying end to a meal of pan-roasted halibut with buerre blanc, sauteed fresh corn, and a spinach salad, and it got me thinking about pie.

Years ago, when my friend and colleague Leah and I started our first online writing community for our sixth graders, using new-ish technology to bridge the distance between our 2 middle schools, the students immediately started shaping the virtual space all on their own, first by posting polls and questionnaires on the discussion board topic we called Random. One of the more memorable was Pie or Ice Cream?  

The profound simplicity of the question, along with the engaged debate it inspired, convinced me that we were on to something much larger than we knew. Our students voluntarily wrote seven days a week, nearly 24 hours a day, on that topic and many others. It was September 2006, coincidentally the very same month that Facebook went live to anyone over the age of 13 with an email address.

As for me? I love ice cream, but I was always pie, no question. Here are 8 of my favorites, in no particular order:

Lemon Meringue
Peach and Blueberry
Blackberry Cobbler
Apple Cranberry
Pecan
Sour Cherry
Chocolate Mousse
Key Lime

And, if I didn't have to choose between the two, I would have them a la mode, anytime!