Birthday, the Day After

I got through my birthday without pestilence or a plague of locust descending upon us. Since Anne had such a beautiful day for her birthday, a week ago, I thought surely that one of those would befall my day. It turned out to be a nice day, not as sunny as was predicted, but nice anyway. We started out with mass, had a lovely breakfast and then went for an hour long hike on the Blue Trail in Chesequake Park. I did not bring binoculars, but wish I had because we saw a bit of wildlife including a raccoon, osprey and cormorant, along with ducks and geese. We went to dinner at Charlie Brown's and then went to a play at Two Rivers Theater in Red Bank. The play was Orestes by Euripides. It is a Greek tragic romp written 2400 years ago, but is still funny today, with some tweaks to the language to make it more relevant to the modern audience. It is amazing how human emotions and conditions can transcend the centuries and be recognizable even now. You see, Apollo (the god) ordered Orestes and his sister, Electra, to kill their mother because she had killed their father, Agamemnon, who had killed their sister, Iphigenia, to get the winds to blow so that his ships could get to Troy to do battle because of the trouble started by their aunt Helen. Well, now the whole town is upset and has condemned Orestes and Electra to kill themselves for their deeds, but they reason that their mother was a bad person anyway and they were ordered to kill her by Apollo, so they hatch a scheme to save themselves and be hailed as heros for what they did.

My birthday celebration really started on March 12th when my friend, Marie, took me out for a delightful lunch. Today, two former coworkers, Laura and Kate, are taking me to lunch. On Sunday three of our children and their families are coming for a March birthday celebration. By the time all the celebrating is over, I will have gained an unmentionable amount of weight. On Monday, however, the gaiety ends because I have a dentist appointment to begin putting in a crown or cap or something. A couple of weeks ago I had a root canal done in preparation for this. Oh, joy, joy, I can hardly contain myself.