Tag: birthday

Les Green would have been 100

Les Green

Les Green would have been 100 on September 26, 1926. He was my dad, or, as I gleaned from a speaker I saw in Chautauqua in 2024, he IS my dad. His death in 2000 does not change that fact.

I love the picture above, though I don’t know how old he is here.

Of course, I’ve written about him more than two dozen times, usually on September 25. On September 26, I write about the grandchild he never knew, my daughter. Also, I note August 10, the date he died.

I only discovered in 2019 the name of his biological father, Raymond Cone. But he was raised in the household of his grandparents, Samuel Walker and Mary Eugenia (Patterson), as well as various aunts and uncles, in Binghamton, NY.

For years, the 1930 Census confounded me. He was listed as Wesley Walker, the “son” of Samuel and Eugenia. The fiction of the relationship didn’t confuse me, but “Wesley”  did. Eventually, I visited the state archives and confirmed that he was born Leslie Walker.

Les Green

Flower child

I love this photo because it reminds me of his longtime talent for arranging flowers. He worked occasionally at Costas’s flower shop in Binghamton and arranged flowers for several family weddings, debutante balls, and the like. I had /have NO talent for this, but I would accompany him and my sister Leslie and schlep stuff.

BTW, I have no idea where or, especially, when these photos were taken. He looks so happy, full of joy.  There’s no sign of that weird rollercoaster that I assume he experienced living with his mother, Agatha Walker, and his stepfather, McKinley, and then not, but ultimately being adopted by Mac just before Les’ 18th birthday.  

Les Green

I feel as though that, maybe, I had seen these photos before. But I certainly never had copies of them until my daughter and I went down to Charlotte, NC, in May 2026. He, Mom, and baby sister had moved down there in 1974. The daughter and I selected and scanned a bunch of pics.

It seems that I should have some profound observations on the centennial of his birth. There was some talk of maybe some family members rerecording some Green Family Singers songs, but that didn’t happen. 

I still have the unanswerable questions I’ve had since he passed away.  Happy birthday, dear old dad (D.O.D.), as you dubbed yourself.

My wife’s “summer off” – HA!

It’s her birthday!

My wife took the summer off from her job in a local tutoring program. You would not necessarily know it. When we were in Connecticut the last week of June, she received a call from a parent over an issue. This is not a singular event. When we were out at a concert at Albany’s Palace Theatre a couple of months ago, the same thing. We’ve gone out to dinner at restaurants at least twice in 2026, and she has to take a call.

Am I jealous? Nah, it’s important work. Okay, maybe a little bit jealous.

Her primary non-work task is taking care of her mom, which is surely a part-time job in its own right. She’s my MIL’s primary health care and fiscal proxy. All of MIL’s mail now comes to our house; just sorting it can be a task.  In the spring, my MIL had to go to the hospital for a couple of days, then to a rehab center for nearly two months. Should MIL move to another facility? (That’s a whole ‘nother conversation.)

My wife also has had some personal financial decisions that got shoved to the last minute.

Define “fun”

Someone asked us what we’re doing for fun this summer. Other than going to the annual family reunion we just got back from, and seeing one concert, I’m not feeling it. 

We ought to tackle the storage units we got for MIL’s stuff a couple of years ago.   The house needs deep cleaning. These do NOT feel like “fun” tasks.

My wife has about a month remaining on her “vacation.” Maybe something will pop up. The picture of Mark Twain FLIRTING with my wife – or maybe it’s the other way around! – happened because we were going to the celebration of life of the ex-husband of a good friend, so we left for Hartford, CT, a couple of hours early. (I’ll have to write about it.) 

Anyway, it’s my wife’s birthday today. I THINK we’ll do something fun today. Last week, she had an appointment every weekday.  No, we’ll do SOMETHING; after all, it’s also our lunaversary.

Lydster: Div III gallery invitation

Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

This is the Div III gallery invitation for the Daughter’s show, which she is sharing with three other artists. What’s Div III? Don’t worry about it. 

What is kuumba? It is “a Swahili term that translates to Creativity. This principle is about making the community more beautiful and beneficial than it was inherited. Kuumba encourages the use of creative energy to improve the conditions of the community and to leave a legacy that honors both ancestral heritage and future generations.” 

When she was working on the show title, she was concerned that people wouldn’t know what it meant.  She knows the term kuumba in part because she’s been  studying Swahili. I was of the opinion that people would figure it out.  

The Daughter has always been creative. I’m sure I’ve written about her talent – here and here, e.g.; I’ve tried NOT to steer her in a particular direction.

What’s going to be in the show? I’m not certain. She has about two dozen pieces she’s completed, but there is space for only about half of them.

One of her early pieces was tied to W.E.B.DuBois’s the American Negro exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. He “developed colorful hand-drawn charts, graphs, and maps that illustrated the social realities of African Americans.” She integrated the graphics with her own genealogical line. But it may not fit.

For certain, her semester at the University of Cape Town in the first half of 2025 will be represented. 

Natal day

I must note that today is her birthday. At the risk of publicly embarrassing her – hey, isn’t that what parenting is all about? – she’s shown a much greater sense of time management in the past year or two. Even when she “goofed off” hanging with the parents for three days in mid-February, she recognized that she needed to redouble her efforts the following week.  

We may not visit with her at Easter break because she’ll want to finish framing some pieces and then hang the display, but we’re looking forward to seeing her at her show.

Keeping score in bowling

cognitive prosthesis

I wrote about my mother four years ago on the broad topic, but this will focus on keeping score in bowling. My sisters remember that she was in a league for at least a decade while in Binghamton, NY, and for about five years in Charlotte, NC. Recently, I learned from one of my sisters that my mother got her bank job in Charlotte because she had been the captain of her bowling team, which showed that she displayed leadership qualities! I did not know that!

In Binghamton, she bowled with her good friend Pat Fink, later Jones. But my sisters say she was also on a team with Pat Whitfield Jones, a woman from our church who was a daughter of my godparents; my parents were her son Walter’s godparents.

I don’t specifically remember where my mom and her friends bowled. But I’m sure I went to some of her league games with her.

Keeping score

Moreover, as noted, I learned to keep score in bowling from my mother and/or her friends. But with the current lanes, scoring is automatic. I was mildly saddened when I first experienced this “new” thing.

Here’s a real sidebar, where  Cory Doctorow alluded to a phenomenon: “I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head. Now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine!…

“Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there’s always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get… 

“Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it’s the same thing as arithmetic).

“Now I keep hearing about millennials who can’t read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.” [I’m not sure I agree with the analog clock analogy, but whatever.] 

Yet I still can keep scoring in bowling, which has value to me. I love that my mother taught me something of what is now of limited applicability precisely because it links us not only to the task but also to a specific timeframe. My childhood memory is remarkably spotty, so I embrace whatever connection exists. 

Family

My father and my sisters would occasionally bowl, but my sisters said they weren’t very good at it. This was before bowling establishments installed barriers to prevent people from throwing gutter balls. I was pretty competent in my few years in a league. I assume the years of my mother’s play made her a decent bowler. 

So this was Roger and his mom again, which is cool. Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, nee Williams, died on this date in 2011.

Dick Van Dyke is 100

bupkis

Dick Van Dyke is 100. I have loved DVD since I watched his 1961-1966 show, which I wrote about at length here. And I loved sharing my DVDS DVD set with my daughter. Here are my favorite episodes. I know more than bupkis about the show.

But I saw him in many other programs, including his many appearances on The Carol Burnett Show, the Diagnosis: Murder series, the movie Night at the Museum, and even the New Dick Van Dyke Show, a lesser offering than the first series. 

I adored his small part as old man Mr. Dawes in Mary Poppins Returns (2018), reprising a role he played in the original movie, with a lot of makeup no longer needed in the latter. 

A movie I saw on television,  more than once, was Cold Turkey (1971).  “Hoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amid the media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa, accepts the challenge–and the company’s PR man tries to sabotage the effort.” It was directed and co-written by Norman Lear.

I watched Dick Van Dyke: 98 Years of Magic two years ago, plus several other game show/variety show/special programs. 

Other voices

In his 2017 documentary film, ‘If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,’ Carl Reiner had his old friends Lear and DVD come over to be interviewed by CBS Sunday Morning’s Tracy Smith. Dick has said publicly that he misses his old friends. Lear and Reiner are gone, as are almost all of his DVDS co-stars. 

Here’s one of Ken Levine’s favorite episodes. Mark Evanier saw a taping of a show when he was a kid, and links to his TEN favorite episodes, and notes the comic book.

In December 2024, Kelly Sedinger linked to a couple of Dick Van Dyke Christmas-related pieces. One was the December 18, 1963, The DVDS episode of The Alan Brady Show Presents. I remember that episode extraordinarily well. As I recall, someone – Carl Reiner or maybe producer Sheldon Leonard – was resisting doing a holiday show until he realized that he could show it every year, which turned out to be two more years.

99-Year-Old Dick Van Dyke Reacts to His Life in Photos: ‘Mary Poppins,’ ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’ American Masters on PBS will be saluting him in an episode that debuted yesterday.

All My Love – Coldplay

Happy birthday, Dick Van Dyke!