Birthday party

Grayson's party was a great success. Good slides and bouncers, good company, good cake. All the kids seemed to have a really good time.

Only fly in the ointment was that Grayson started feeling sick by the time we headed home. And by bedtime, he had a really stuffy noise and bad cough. So, we're home together today, on his birthday. And we had to cancel the family dinner we had scheduled for tonight with my folks and my grandmother Sybil. I'm feeling a bit sinusy myself, and when I talked with Gray earlier, he said he was feeling a bit the same. Sigh. Ah well, at least Grayson didn't get sick until AFTER his birthday party. We can reschedule the dinner for another evening this week when we're all feeling better.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures. Grayson had lots of help from friends in opening his presents. In the top photo, the boy on the right is Sam Powell, he lives down the street from us. John Tolbert is Grayson's best friend, there on the left. Sam Alley is half out of the picture on the far left.

There were a couple of really good inflatable slides. The best was a big ship that had a long dark tunnel you had to go through to get up to the top. And it was a really fast slide, too. Some of us grown-ups enjoyed it, as well as the kids.

There was no place in the party room to hang a pinata, so Gray just cut open the bottom and shook all the candy out over the kids heads. It was hilarious. Four pounds of candy was scooped up in under a minute.

Today Grayson's hanging out in his pajamas playing his new Spore game. He seems content, if a little wheezy and sniffly.

Let them eat cake

Here they are... the birthday cakes. We went with two this time, just because we couldn't decide whether to do the beetle or the caterpillar. So we did both.

An Old Friend

I ran into an old friend yesterday. I had stopped at Byron's on the way home from work to pick up some wine and I was crossing the parking lot, minding my own business. A guy with a mustache was leaving the store and crossing the parking lot towards me. He had on dark glasses and seemed to be sort of checking me out, so I lowered my head and prepared to go by him acting oblivious. But just as we passed each other he said "Hey Linda."

I stopped and turned around and looked at him, but he wasn't anyone I knew. I looked and he said something like "How you doing?" and finally I just said "who ARE you??" And he lowered his glasses a bit and looked over them and said "I'm Jeff."

Jeff Nichols. My old friend from the Arts Institute days, who had been the site foreman during many long hours at the Fall institutes. Jeff and I had worked together for several years, 15 hours a day, 5 days a week at Quartz Mountain, setting up and tearing down each week's workshops. We had hung gallery art, moved pianos, bought supplies, covered floors, hauled heavy easels out of second-floor storage areas down steep narrow staircases. Working like that with someone, you get to know them pretty well. And until he had moved his glasses, I hadn't had any clue who he was.

In my defense, he has cut off his hair AND beard. And once he lifted his shades it fell into place immediately. I gave him a big hug and we stood there in the Byron's parking lot for over an hour, catching up. It has been nearly ten years since I saw him. TEN YEARS. It didn't feel like anything like that long, though, as we stood there, shooting the shit. He's just the same as he was before, only with more grey in his mustache. This is the thing about being well and truly grown up: the passage of time is relative. I recognize the passage of time not in how much I've changed, but in how other people's kids have changed. Jeff told me it was his son's 30th birthday. When I first met Jeff, that son was a gangly teenager. Jeff turns 50 this year. Amazing.

It's true that in your mind you achieve a certain age and that's where you stay. I've stuck at around 32 or 34. I never really think of myself as any older than that. Gray said he's clocked in at around his mid-twenties. I guess we will someday be old geezers, still feeling like we're twenty or thirty-something. I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Do I want to feel older? Physically, I certainly feel my age. My hips are creaky, my eyes are weaker, my back aches. What would I expect to feel if I felt my mental age? Smarter? I wish. Mainly I'm just more forgetful.

Like, I've been wracking my brain the past few days trying to remember if I got Gray a birthday present. One night a week or so ago, I woke up at 3 a.m. worried that I hadn't given him anything for his birthday and trying to figure out why. Then I realized I couldn't even remember if I had given him anything or not, much less what it was, if I did. Surely that can't be normal? So I lay awake worrying over my early onset Altzheimers. Well, you gotta have something to worry about at 3 a.m.

Anyway, it was great to see Jeff. We exchanged phone numbers and promised not to wait another ten years. I bought my wine and drove home with a smile on my face. That's another thing about knowing someone so well... even after ten years, you're still friends.