February 5, 2006

• HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  
  

  A big bundle of significant birthdays are happening right about
  now. 
  Scratch that.  Every birthday, for everybody, is
  significant.  Birthdays are milestones, trophies, little gold
  stars to stick on the ends of our noses to show the world that we’ve
  survived another 365 or 366 days. 

  What I meant to say was that
  many people who are
  important to me or who have had significant impact on my life were born
  with the Sun in Aquarius.

  Yesterday
  was Betty Friedan’s eighty-fifth birthday, and also the day of her
  death.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few of my readers
  who don’t know who she was.  If so, I’ll bet they can ask their
  mothers and/or grandmothers, and find out who this courageous,
  brilliant, fast-talking, loud and abrasive old woman was.

  One evening in the 1960s she was sitting over drinks with a few
  friends.  They were discussing the country’s need of “something
  like the NAACP, for women.”  As John Lennon said so eloquently,
  “Woman is the nigger of the world.”

  Ms. Friedan picked up a napkin and a pen and wrote down three
  letters:  NOW.  She co-founded the National Organization for
  Women.  They changed our society so radically with their outspoken
  protest, that a whole generation of women can’t even imagine what it
  was like before those women came along.

  There was a time when on college campuses copies of her book, The Feminine Mystique, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
  were passed from “girl” to “girl” until some of them began insisting on
  being called “women”.  The same thing happened among the girls in
  the steno pool and the gals who gathered in each other’s suburban
  kitchens for coffee.  If you haven’t read The Feminine Mystique, or haven’t read it lately, check it out of a library or check out Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 online.

  Tomorrow is Bob Marley’s birthday.  Had he lived, he would be
  sixty-one, my age, just a few months younger than I.  If you don’t
  know who this old dead guy was, I pity you.
  
  I’ve been trying to imagine Marley with gray hair, because I can’t
  imagine him bald.  Among the multitude of things for which I am
  grateful, I am grateful that Bob Marley left recordings and offspring.

  
  Here’s another Aquarian you ought to get to know, if you don’t know him
  already.  He’s a little vague and ambiguous on the subject of
  birthdays, age, and many other things, but Xanga wouldn’t be as
  interesting without him.

  I’d like him better if I knew him better, but I suppose I have to
  accept (even if I don’t understand, respect or appreciate) his desire
  for privacy and anonymity.  I suspect he’s angling for a mystique,
  playing hard-to-get.  *sigh*  He thinks he’s OLD, or at least
  he says he thinks he is.  I don’t think he’s quite the silverback
  he makes himself out to be, and I know for a fact that he is years younger than I am.

  Another Xangan Aquarian who is important to me is this young master swordsman, ace gamer and avid doll collector, Sephiroth. 
  He and Doug were buddies, fellow D&D and RPG addicts, and
  co-conspirators through middle school and high school.  For some
  months back then, Seph called our couch “home”.

  Last I heard, he was in Korea, in the U.S. Army, having re-enlisted
  following a brief fling at civilian life when he got back from Iraq.

   During his first hitch, they trained him as a truck mechanic and
  he carved out a little niche for himself doing some clerical and
  computing tasks in the motor pool. 

  This time around, he asked the recruiter if he could have a new
  MOS.  Now he is learning to identify and dispose of nuclear,
  chemical and biological weapons.

  This
  Aquarian is my son Will, the elder of my two sons (shown at left with
  my granddaughter Michael Ann, and below in my arms shortly before he
  and I were parted).  He appears in my memoirs under the nicknames
  I knew him by when I knew him, Ronnie and P-Nut.  He is retired
  from a career as a smoke jumper, a firefighter with the U.S. Forest
  Service, which came after some combat experience in the U.S.
  military.  What I know about him is sketchy because I learned it
  all in a single phone conversation.

  I searched for him for over three decades, before I found some tracks
  his father had left on the web.  Through being obnoxiously
  persistent in reminding that man that I knew who he had been before he
  decided to write a new personal history for himself, I got an email
  that contained a demand that I not contact him again, and the name of
  the town that my son had lived in the last time his father had heard
  from him, presumably some years in the past.

  With
  that clue and an online people-finder, I found Will.  We had one
  phone conversation when  he called me after receiving the letter I
  wrote, and he responded to one or two of my emails, but remains
  distant.  Who can blame him?  I never phoned him back (don’t
  have his number), and that’s on top of disappearing from his life
  before he was two years old.  Nobody ever explained the
  circumstances to him, and I don’t think he believed what I told 
  him.  I gave him the URL here so he could read the memoir, but he
  has never acknowledged having seen it.

  The last time I emailed him was on his birthday a couple of years ago. 
  I sent an ecard and got the confirmation that it had been picked up,
  but no reply.  Then we lost our hard drive and I no longer had his
  email address.  I think I still have his mailing address and the
  printout from the people finder, but they are lost in my clutter.

  Some mother, eh?  I keep losing and  misplacing my kids.

  Happy Birthday, Will, and all the rest of you Aquarians.
  

  • 9:57 pm
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