Birthday girl in a wildly spinning world

Even though I am back in the tunnel with work, juggling both the book and the next issue of the magazine, I should mark this day. The kids are coming over tomorrow to celebrate my birthday with me. And by kids I mean my two grown ones, their loves, the nieces, and Gabby, who lived with us for the month of April as she did a round of doctors appointments, trying to figure out why her body went haywire on her on the very day in February that she turned thirty.

She and my daughter and a few others of her friends were supposed to fly to Mexico for a milestone birthday getaway. Gabby is famously a world traveler; my daughter went to China and Thailand with her a couple years ago, but this time, they had to cancel. Gabby had been staying with her parents ever since, and came to us in April as her parents had to travel, and none of us felt comfortable with Gabby being on her own. Her symptoms have been random, mysterious, and scary, yet she's maintained such a robust spirit. She is a therapist, and teleworked from our home most afternoons into the late evening, since most people do therapy at the end of the workday. But last week her doctor advised her to take some disability leave, as sitting up in a chair for hours on end was aggravating her back pain. She's on the mend, I hope, thanks to a couple of iron infusions she had. I love this girl. She's been in our lives a long time. She and my daughter went to the same lower and middle school, and she also lived with us for two summers, before eighth and ninth grades, when she and my daughter attended the same scholar program.

This time around, she and I had such a great time binge watching TV shows that were absorbingly good (Apples Never Fall, Hacks) and deliciously bad (The Traitors, both the American and the British versions). Now that her parents are back from their travels, she is back with them in the Bronx. I do miss her company. While she was here, I worked at the dining table while she watched seasons of Ru Paul's Drag Race in the background, and I could concentrate fully while still feeling a part of the human world. She felt like a daughter, really, her energy generous and warm. She can stay here anytime. 

I am very much looking forward to seeing my son tomorrow. He arrived home from New Mexico tonight, after spending the week at bomb school with some of his fellow firefighters—yes, you read that right, bomb school. He called me for my birthday from the airport earlier, and assured me that the department does not have a bomb squad, and does not intend to send them to go and defuse bombs after a week of study. "It takes years of intensive training to be able to do that," he said, "but they want us to be able to recognize situations in which bombs might be at play and have some sense of how best to protect people." His wife, my daughter, and I all exhaled. 

My husband is making many flavors of scones tomorrow and my daughter is making me a pineapple upside down cake using my mother's recipe, and we are going to have a Survivor watch party in anticipation of the May 22 finale. We'll nosh and sip mimosas and just basically have a laid back family day. Then on Sunday, it's back to work, as the first pass pages of the book I've been working on all year are due back to the publisher on Monday.

There was much else I wanted to write about this week, but I didn't really have time. But why did a thousand police officers storm Columbia's campus on Tuesday night after students occupied one of the administrative buildings. Isn’t taking over university buildings what student protesters have always done? Wasn't this how Columbia students helped compel the end of the Vietnam War in the late sixties? When I was a student there in the seventies and eighties, we marched to end apartheid in South Africa. Now, on a growing number of university campuses across the country they’re setting up encampments and occupying buildings to end the war in Gaza. 

This was the scene outside Columbia three nights ago just a few blocks from my house. I was scared for the students, because there's no telling what happens when so many cops get involved. Students were roughed up, some were concussed, and hundreds were arrested. And one officer's gun accidentally discharged in their midst but no one was hit. I'm thankful it wasn't worse than that, but Columbia's president made a terrible and unwarranted call in bringing in police. The protesters weren’t violent, so why escalate? Don’t be misled by outside agitators saying and doing God-awful things to smear this peace movement. I’m choosing to keep my eyes on the courage and idealism of the students, who still manage to believe we have the power to heal this hurting world.

Oh, and this also happened, my choir had our spring concert and we sounded great! Hard to avoid making a joyful noise with sixty-five voices exhuberantly raised in song! Our closing number, a Sound of Music medley, was the hit of the show.

Look at that—I wrote a whole meandering post. I miss you, friends. I'll be back around soon.