birthday Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

My wife’s best anniversary present

Working hard for the money

Our 25th wedding anniversary was two months ago, this very day. Here’s my wife’s best anniversary present to me.

I asked her when she wanted to go out to dinner at Yono’s that week. We hadn’t gone out to that elegant four-star restaurant in about 15 years, probably on or around our 10th wedding anniversary. We knew it was time to try it again.

So I asked my wife when she wanted to go out. Wednesday, which was our actual anniversary? No, she couldn’t because she had a work meeting. Tuesday? No, she had another meeting. Thursday, not only did I have choir rehearsal, but she also had yet another meeting.

OK, I guess we could go on the weekend, although I hate going out when everybody else is likely doing the same. Then she said, “Well, you know what? We could go out on Wednesday because it’s our anniversary!” I thought this was extraordinary, given the busyness of her life. So she DIDN’T go to a work meeting, which was astonishing.

We had a lovely time. There was great, attentive service and excellent food. Our conversation with one of the service, newly in Albany, was quite interesting.

“Retirement” job

My wife’s “retirement” job is obviously very time-consuming. The other thing that my wife did, presumably for herself, is that she took off eight weeks during the summer. It is so she can catch up on various tasks, including household chores, gardening, and whatnot.

We also have to do exciting things like talk to our TIAA-CREF agent because our old one got kicked upstairs and we need to meet the new one. They’re probably a nice person, but this is real My Eyes Glaze Over kind of stuff, though probably necessary.

I will tell you the truth: her taking time off from work is also a vacation for me. When she was working I often got volunteered, or, to be fair, volunteered myself to help her with her tabling at various events or to set up for event such as the end-of-year volunteers’ dinner.

Also, we’re going to go away a couple of times during the summer, which we can do because our lovely daughter is home taking care of the feline. That’s a good thing.

Happy birthday to my dear wife.

Watching people work

Fargo?

Here’s another day in the life post: Tuesday, March 26. For some reason, many of these are on Tuesdays. Reflecting on it, I spent a lot of time watching people work. The ones I watched for the longest time were the half-dozen people taking down that tree across the street from my house, especially looking out my middle bay window. It was better than television.

The process involved a guy in the cherry picker trimming the branches of two trees and tethering the damaged section with rope so it would not fall too quickly. The guys below were putting the small branches in the wood chipper – wood chippers always remind me of the movie Fargo. The chips flew into the back of a truck like the one pictured. A guy was running a tractor-like vehicle that carried logs to the chipper. One fellow was carefully controlling passing traffic in both directions.

It fascinated me because I would have had no idea how to take down the tree without potentially damaging a house or car. And the tree is gone; there aren’t even signs of the roots. I love Men At Work.

Library

I helped facilitate the interview of author Ian Ross Singleton by educator Geri Walsh concerning his book The Two Differences, which is a lot about Detroit but especially Odessa, Ukraine.

They had invited the Ukraine Solidarity Capital District to table at the event. The group stands for the country’s “independence and territorial integrity.”

Kudos to reference librarian Susan, the new liaison with the FFAPL for Tuesday book reviews and author talks. Oddly, we went to library school simultaneously but only realized this a few months ago.

I saw the interim branch manager, Deanna, at the circulation desk. Librarians do it all.

Indian food

I agreed to order takeout from our nearby Indian restaurant. I usually order takeout to pick up around 5:30, and it’s relatively efficient. Because of my wife’s work schedule, I arranged for a slightly later slot. I called at 6 p.m. and was told it would take about 25 minutes.

When I arrived at the restaurant at 6:25, I was asked to sit at a table. People arriving after I got there were told the same thing. There was some confusion; the guy at the register was not a native speaker, I gathered, and it became incumbent for me to explain to them that we were all in the same situation.

However, an increasingly impatient couple was there before I was. He said repeatedly, “How long will this take?” with an increasing edge in his voice. She counted up: “It’s been 35 minutes!” “It’s been 40 minutes!”

When the next order came out, the guy at the register asked them, “Is this your order? Aloo gobi, chicken tikka masala, and lamb saag?” Er, no, that was mine, which made them more disgusted. I wondered, in retrospect, if they were walk-ins. I understood their frustration, but their attitude made me uncomfortable.

Still, the usual manager or owner might have diffused the situation with free mango lassis or another strategy.

And finally

Our daughter complained online that her parents hadn’t gotten her anything for her birthday. “I didn’t know what you wanted.” “I made a list online on Saturday!” That would have been useful to have known.

So, some mail-order workers will get some items to our daughter soon.

Lydster: something substantial

clarinet

My daughter has commanded that I write something substantial about her for her significant birthday. But it’s TWO hard! How can I encapsulate her TWO decades in one post? I know – I’ll write TWO posts over TWO months! My blog, my rules.

Let’s start before the beginning. My wife had asked, more than once, if I was ready to have a child. My response, of course, was: how the heck do I know? I had said I was amenable to trying, but when you’re five decades old, you don’t know if it would happen.

Then it did. My wife and I remember when we first knew she was pregnant, but no one else, save for folks in the doctor’s office, did. We were returning from a small party when we saw our friend Fred. He was out with his one-week-old named Carol. Indeed, Fred has mentioned this encounter in the past year, so it was significant to him, too, especially after he heard about our secret.

We developed a birth plan, and when we realized the ob/gyn was not on board, my wife changed doctors at eight months pregnant, which I thought was great. Scary, but bold.

Eureka!

The child was born. She didn’t sleep well for a few days, so neither did we. But things got better eventually. Someone had told us that the way one gets a child to sleep is to drive them around. This was SO not the case for her! On trips to see her maternal grandparents in Oneonta, NY, she’d cry -OK, wail – for ten minutes before falling asleep for an hour. She’d wake up and start wailing again UNLESS her father got into the back seat with her and sang to her constantly: e.g., OldMcDonaldHadAFarmEIEIOAndOnThatFarm… This generally worked.

My workmates had gotten us a red carriage, and I loved to ride her around the neighborhood. The school district has razed the 99-year-old School 19 and then built Pine Hills Elementary School on the same site. I appreciated that they built a new structure just for my daughter, or so I chose to believe.

After my wife returned to work, she dropped our daughter off at a private daycare for the first year. It was during that time that I SHOULD have been recording all of her milestones: when she started to crawl then walk – the former was earlier than the norm, the latter, slightly later. She crawled up the stairs, much to the horror of her mother.

As a result of NOT tracking her progress in the book, I’ve been writing about her EVERY month on the 26th since May 2005. I might have written about her on other days, but this is at least the 227th piece. Now, I could wade through this blog and pick out highlights in her life. But, with few exceptions, I will wing it instead.

Daycare

Around that time, I took her to Mercy Cares for Kids, right on the bus line. We were happy about the diverse population of the children. I loved dropping her off, and it was our little time together. Then I’d take another bus to work.

Only one time that she got there but refused to stay, and it was a morning that, for some reason, we got there about a half hour late. She did NOT like to go in when all of the other kids were already there. So I brought her home and took off the day from work. Even then, she had rules.

When she started school, she attended Watervliet Elementary for kindergarten since her mother taught there. Then, she went to Pine Hills Elementary for grades 1-6. She met her bestie, Kay, there.

Her sense of fashion was evident early on. After she outgrew the hand-me-downs my wife’s friend Alison gave us, my daughter largely specified her wardrobe. Early on, it was pink and purple, but she quickly developed her own style. She also started taking care of her hair, in part because her parents were fairly hapless. Eventually, she also got into makeup. Her process is tied to her sense of art, which is very strong.

Popular culture

We watched a lot of television together, such as Little Bear and Franklin. Wonder Pets was a favorite; her mom was Linny, the guinea pig, I was Turtle Tuck, and she was Ming-Ming Duckling. Later, she watched some Disney shows, some of which were not awful.

The first compact disc I bought her was the Beatles #1s. When we saw Paul McCartney in 2014, she knew most of the band’s songs but was less versed in solo Macca and Wings. I also tried to let her know about 1960s and 1970s Motown. Ultimately, she found her taste, listening to Pentatonix, then BTS, but ultimately 1990’s soul, especially Blaque. She owns a 3-LP set of

My daughter was involved in various ballet, soccer, and other activities. It’s all a learning process, and we never prodded her to continue. She WAS pretty good at the clarinet, though, and we still have the instrument in case she ever wants to return to it.

That’s enough for this month, except to wish her a wonderful birthday!

Ron Howard Is 70

From Mayberry To The Moon

I have been watching Ron Howard since I was seven when he played Opie Taylor (1960-1968) on The Andy Griffith Show. Sheriff Andy Taylor seemed like a pretty cool dad. Andy’s show was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show, and Opie appeared in that backdoor pilot.

Maybe I saw him earlier than that. Ron had a small part in the Walking Distance episode of The Twilight Zone (1959) inspired by Recreation Park in Binghamton, NY.

He appeared as a guest star in various programs I watched, including Dr. Kildare, I Spy, and The Fugitive. You likely do not remember The Smith Family (1971-1972) series, even though it starred Henry Fonda. Ron Howard was in 39 episodes of that, and I watched.

In 1973, Ron starred in the movie American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, the springboard for several actors. I still recall his appearance in MASH the same year, which was a strong performance.

Of course, he starred in Happy Days (1974-1984). I watched it until shortly after Fonzie jumped the shark.

One performance I missed until I saw it on television in the 21st century was in his role of Winthrop Paroo, the younger brother of Marion (Shirley Jones), in the 1962 movie The Music Man. Here’s the Wells Fargo Wagon.

Director

In the late 1970s, he started stepping away from in front of the camera. These are movies he’s directed that I’ve seen, all in the cinema: Night Shift (1982), Splash (1983), Cocoon (1985), and Apollo 13 (1995). I’ve greatly admired Apollo 13, for which one feels real tension, even though one knows how the real story ended.

Ron also directed and produced these films I saw: Parenthood (1989), Cinderella Man (2005), Frost/Nixon (2008), and A Beautiful Mind (2001), for which he won two Academy Awards.

He was the executive producer of TV shows such as Sports Night (1998-2000), Parenthood (1990-1991, 2010-2015), and Arrested Development (2003-2019), serving as the announcer for the latter.

Ron has been married to Cheryl Allen since 1975. They have four children, including actor Bryce Dallas Howard. Ron has a brother, Clint Howard, who I’ve also seen perform since his debut on The Andy Griffith Show at age 2.

Beverly Gray wrote a 2003 bio, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon…and Beyond, which I have not read, but it’s a great title. It feels as though Ronny Howard, or Ron Howard, has been in my life forever on television and movie screens.

Oprah Winfrey turns 70

National Women’s Hall of Fame

When someone answers “Oprah” on JEOPARDY, when the correct response is “Oprah Winfrey,” the answer is generally adjudged to be correct. It’s like “Elvis” for “Elvis Presley.”.

Oprah’s A.M. Chicago show, which was much more successful with her at the helm, went national after her “Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for—her performance as Sofia in the film The Color Purple.”

I started watching her program early in its run, around 1986. I did not view it regularly as it was on in the afternoon. But I appreciated seeing her show the empathy that allowed celebrities and regular folks to open up to her.

I know I saw her interviews with the Little Rock Nine, the black kids trying to integrate the Arkansas high school in 1957, requiring the support of troops sent by President Eisenhower. But also participating were a bunch of white kids who jeered the Nine. There was a rapprochement that was truly powerful.

I saw some stars, such as Paul McCartney and Tom Cruise, the latter of whom “jumped around the set, hopped onto a couch, fell rapturously to one knee and repeatedly professed his love for his then-girlfriend, Katie Holmes…

“On February 10, 1993, Winfrey sat down in a prime-time special broadcast with Michael Jackson, who had performed ten days earlier in the Super Bowl XXVII halftime show, for what would become the most-watched interview in television history.” I watched that, too.

Personal

She was an effective interviewer because of her vulnerability and compassion. “On November 10, 1986, during a show about sexual abuse, Winfrey revealed that she was raped by a relative when she was nine years old. Since this episode, Winfrey has used the show as a platform to help catch child predators, raise awareness, and give victims a voice.”

And from 1995, “I was involved with a man in my twenties who introduced me to cocaine. I always felt that the drug itself was not the problem but that I was addicted to the man… I have said many times I did things I was ashamed of in my twenties, and I’ve done things I’ve felt guilty about. And that is my life’s great secret that’s been held over my head. I understand the shame, and I understand the guilt, I understand the secrecy, I understand all that.”

She had segments I enjoyed, such as her Book Club and the fiscal advice from Suze Orman. I was much less enthused by two other folks whom she helped launch, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Phil McGraw.

Oprah became a millionaire in 1986 and a billionaire by 2004. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. “Winfrey has won many accolades throughout her career,” including the Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

She aids numerous programs, including an impressive school for girls in South Africa.

Taraji P. Henson Praises Oprah at ‘The Color Purple’ Screening: “She Was There Holding Our Hands.” Oprah produced the Warner Bros. musical remake, which stars Henson alongside Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks.