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.
This
Leaving vehicles running unattended is a crime here.
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