Tag: birthday

The Lydster, Part 108: Another natal day

She continues to surprise me with not just her vocabulary, but her understanding of concepts.

Last year, the Daughter was at least 4’6″; now she’s very close to 4’10” (147 cm). There are some adults she’s practically looking in the eye. I’m only 5’11.5″, but my wife is about 5’10” and her brothers are all about 6’3″, so I can only imagine how tall she’ll get to be.

After performing in the Nutcracker, she seems to have tired of formal ballet lessons, though she’s forever moving about and even choreographing for her cousins and friends.

She discovered soccer in the fall, and I suspect she’ll do that again. She liked doing field hockey in school, and that led her to get her to take her to an Albany Devils’ ice hockey game. What I know about hockey would fit on top of a puck, but she seemed to enjoy the experience.

On TV, she watches figure skating and Dancing with the Stars with her mother, and old Dick van Dyke Show episodes with me. She still likes Wild Kratts, a cartoon about nature.

At least half of the fairy books by Daisy Meadows (a pseudonym for the four writers of the Rainbow Magic books), she’s consumed; for a time, she’d read nothing else. In recent months, though, she’s expanded her reading repertoire.

She continues to be very good at math and spelling. I help her with most of her homework, but her mother practices clarinet with her.

Going to Sunday School seems to be the highlight of the week; she’s getting good at her Bible history. She likes being invited to do special things at church, such as the unveiling of a diorama of our church, or ringing the church bell (tougher than it looks).

Lessee: she continues to surprise me with not just her vocabulary, but her understanding of concepts.

She has well over a dozen dolls. She knows all their names (I don’t), including the new American Girl doll, Sophia, who kinda looks like her. There is actually a floor plan she drew up to determine who sleeps where, with a rotation of who gets to sleep with her.

I suspect that the Newtown, CT shootings have affected her deeply, though she mentions it only in passing.

She’s a good kid who gets along with a variety of people. But I think she NEEDS a number of friends; when she’s with one friend for too long, or too often, the relationship frays a bit.

I guess that’s enough for this year.

Happy birthday, my dear daughter.

Friend Karen is 60

Karen had wanted to be in the music business as long as I could remember.

Karen I’ve known since kindergarten, and we went from K through 12th grade together in Binghamton, NY. Back in seventh grade or so, she really got into astrology. I don’t mean just looking at the daily newspaper column, but doing a serious investigation. While I wasn’t a true believer, I found it eerie how accurate they could be. She was born only 46 hours after I was, so there was some overlap between hers and mine.

When we were in high school, there was this silly rule that, when you were running for student government, you could not give your own nominating speech. I gave Karen’s when she ran for secretary, a speech that everyone said was one of the best ever. She won. The following year, they changed the rules so that the candidate gave the speech; my address for myself, running for president, was not nearly as good, by my own reckoning (I won anyway).

In 1977, when I was adrift, she gave me a real (verbal) kick in the butt. In the early 1980s, she stopped drinking; while, initially, she asked why I hadn’t stopped her, she came to the (correct) conclusion that only SHE could have.

She was there in Boston when I won $17,600 on JEOPARDY! in 1998.

Karen told me that she was relieved that I had had a daughter in 2004. I think she believed, probably rightly, that I had an easier time dealing with girls than boys, going back to when we were kids.

She is a world traveler, having visited Burma, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey, and probably locations I’m forgetting; from the e-mails she sends each winter, I think she ought to blog about it, but she’s disinclined.

Karen had wanted to be in the music business as long as I could remember, nagging her older siblings to buy her the new single by the Kinks or the Rolling Stones, or, of course, the Beatles. In sixth grade, we had a class newspaper, and she wrote a (fictional, alas!) story about meeting the Fab Four.

She did, in fact, go into the music industry. From working in a record store on Main Street in neighboring Johnson City, NY, to getting involved in promoting musicians and their albums, trying to get them on radio, sometimes going to their gigs. Early on, she turned me on to The Band. Later, she introduced me to a whole range of artists too numerous to mention, but including the 1990s iteration of Johnny Cash.

She told great stories, which I cannot do justice to. I remember when she was trying to promote Robbie Robertson’s first solo album in the mid-1980s and had to deal with some 24-year-old station manager. He didn’t know who Robbie was, didn’t know who The Band was or that they had backed Bob Dylan, and had never heard of The Last Waltz, the award-winning movie about their final concerts.

Of course, the music business hasn’t gotten any easier of late, but she’s still at it, trying to develop and promote new artists.

I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to see her at least once a year for the past few years; unfortunately, the last time was at her mom’s funeral, but it was still a joy to see her.

Happy birthday, Sara Lee! (Inside joke.)

The difference between turning 50 and turning 60

When I turned 50, I could think, “Maybe I still have another half a lifetime left.” After all, the number of centenarians in the United States has been growing. Willard Scott, with whom I share a birthday, BTW, still announces the birthdays of those over 100 on NBC-TV’s TODAY show, as far as I know.

Now that I am 60, though, I have to acknowledge that I’m not going to live another 60 years, even if I move to Azerbaijan and start eating yogurt soup. (And if I’m wrong, which one of you is going to write to correct me?)

I note this, not with melancholy or dismay, but with a certain resolve not to waste my time with X or Y. I’ve already done a fair job in that I’ve largely stopped caring about the negative things people who aren’t friends and family say. It’s not that I won’t complain about them, and in fact, I’m even more likely to do so, probably in this blog; it’s that the anger and frustration don’t consume me, as they once did.

Once upon a time, every March 8 (the day after my birthday), I would play a particular Paul Simon tune. The lyric started:
Yesterday it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed
My life’s a mess
But I’m having a good time

I played that song annually for 20 years or more. I should get back to doing that again.

Have a Good Time – Paul Simon

ROG is 60

“Celebrating a birthday reminds us of the goodness of life, and in this spirit we really need to celebrate people’s birthdays every day, by showing gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and affection.”

I generally take my birthday off from work each year, and today is no exception. Likewise, the blog, especially THIS birthday. I was born in the Chinese Year of the Snake, and arithmetically, it is the Year of the Snake for the sixth time in my life; I’m going to slither off now.

I have, in the past, and will again this year, quote a section from one of my favorite books, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen, a Canadian theologian who died in 1996.(Copyright 1994, published by The Crossroad Publishing Company.)

I share this passage about birthdays, not only for my sake but, I hope, for yours as well:

Birthdays need to be celebrated. I think it is more important to celebrate a birthday than a successful exam, a promotion, or a victory. Because to celebrate a birthday means to say to someone: “Thank you for being you.” Celebrating a birthday is exalting life and being glad for it. On a birthday we do not say: “Thanks for what you did, or said, or accomplished.” No, we say: “Thank you for being born and being among us.”
…
Celebrating a birthday reminds us of the goodness of life, and in this spirit we really need to celebrate people’s birthdays every day, by showing gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and affection. These are ways of saying: “It’s good that you are alive; it’s good that you are walking with me on this earth. Let’s be glad and rejoice. This is the day that God has made for us to be and to be together.”
***
Oh, what the heck: Birthday – the Beatles.

Happy 8th anniversary, Rico and niece Rebecca!

Photo taken by Ray Henrikson on February 1, 2013, at First Presbyterian Church, Albany, NY, and used by permission.

George Harrison would have been 70

Here are a dozen Harrison songs. Only the Top 2 are for sure on the list. It seems to change a lot, depending on what I’ve been listening to most recently.

When John Lennon died in 1980, I was devastated. When George Harrison died in November 2001, I was melancholy, but I knew he was sick, so I wasn’t surprised. But as time passed, I realized I missed him more and more. Incidentally, All Things Must Pass was my high school prom theme.

I felt sorry for George in the Beatles. He’d write songs and they wouldn’t make the album, because those two other songwriters in the group dominated. That explained why the All Things Must Pass album had three LPs, including an instrumental experiment.

Unique among the Beatles, George’s first greatest hits album included Beatles songs, even though there were arguably enough of his solo works to make their inclusion unnecessary; this was an insult to the artist by his soon-to-be-former record label, in my view.

Here are a dozen Harrison songs. Only the Top 2 are for sure on the list. It seems to change a lot, depending on what I’ve been listening to most recently. I have all the Harrison solo studio albums, excluding some compilations.

Links to songs.

12. Blow Away (from George Harrison – GH) – Always liked the guitar line.
11. Love Comes to Everyone (GH) – guitar intro by Eric Clapton is quite nice.
10. Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) (Living in the Material World- LITMW) – In one of the later verses, I like how the chorus is sung off the beat. And more than occasionally, I relate to its message.
9. All Those Years Ago (Somewhere in England -SIE) – Harrison’s tribute to John Lennon, featuring Ringo Starr on drums, as well as Wings members Paul and Linda McCartney and Denny Laine on backing vocals
8. Let It Down (All Things Must Pass -ATMP) – Lovely song. Can’t find the album version, unfortunately, but this is nice, too.
7. Devil’s Radio (Cloud Nine – CN) – Like the somewhat nasal quality of the vocal.
6. Living in the Material World (LITMW) – Story of the Beatles, in part. And when he sings, “We got Ritchie on a tour,” and Ringo plays a little drum solo, it always cracks me up.
5. What Is Life (ATMP). On the extended CD of ATMP, there’s an instrumental version of this song that I like nearly as much.
4. Got My Mind Set on You (CN) – I think I like this as much for the surprise element at the time. George hadn’t had an album in five years, let alone a hit single. This muscular Rudy Clark cover seemed to come out of left field.
3. Not Guilty (GH) – At the time, some people thought this was in response to the My Sweet Lord/He’s So Fine lawsuit. (No, but This Song, from Thirty-Three and 1/3 was.) Not Guilty was actually recorded with The Beatles in 1968 for The White Album; like many of his songs, it was not included. However, you can find a louder version on the Beatles’ Anthology 3.
2. Wah Wah (ATMP) – Love the volume, the guitar line, the choir of vocalists, pretty much everything.
1. When We Was Fab (CN) – This telling of the Beatles’ story, though, is the best of the songs in that specific genre.

A couple of Traveling Wilburys songs in the mix.
The last time I wrote about George, which was the 10th anniversary of his death.

Ramblin' with Roger
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