Pop ups

This morning my son work me up by coming into our room with his phone playing the Whitney Houston song "I will always love you." He waved the music around my head till I opened my eyes, then he bent and kissed my forehead and nuzzled his cheek on mine and said, "I love you, Mama!" He was a happy boy and I was smiling too.

Then, still not getting out of bed, though it was already close to nine, I turned over and began reading the Washington Post on my Kindle. I tapped on a story about Germany welcoming some 100,000 refugees from Syria, Africa and Asia, with Germans greeting them at the station with hot food and warm clothes and places to stay in their own homes. Tears brimmed as I read it. The story estimated that before this is over, Germany will have given sanctuary to some 800,000 refugees, the only country in the European Union to throw open its doors.

October, our family's big birthday month is coming up. Our son wants a ukelele for his birthday. "I'm going to be homebound after my knee surgery so I figure I might as well learn something," he said. "And I've always loved the sound of a ukelele."

We're going to be upstate for my husband's birthday, as it will coincide with our daughter's night to run her own real live open-to-the-public pop up restaurant, soup to nuts, from deciding on a theme and a name and a cuisine, to menu planning and front and back of house management. It's for her Restaurant Ops class. The other students in the class will be her staff for that week. Every student takes a turn during the semester. Her partner is her suite mate from freshman year and fellow hotelie. They long ago planned to team up on this required course. We will be among their happy patrons. And we're staying at that bed and breakfast we love. It's been discovered and we can now only get a room there in the off-season (as in not on move-in our move-out weekends or graduation.) I think we'll try absinthe again at their elegant zinc-top living room bar.