Birthdays

There have been two birthdays lately. The first was my mother's 70th birthday. There was a huge party thrown on her behalf with lots of friends and all pseudo-east coast family present. Four of her five children and all of their children were present. God knows my mother deserved it. She put up with more crap from my father than we will ever know, including practically raising five kids by herself. After 29 years of marriage, they split. It had something to do with the fact that they argued all of the time and that he was genuinely unhappy so went and found himself an unattached woman with little besides herself to take care of (a few cats but they can go days at a time without being seen by any human). He probably should have waited until they were divorced before starting to see her, but like most males was thinking with a part of himself somewhat south of his brain, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I was not ever unhappy about their divorce since it was the best thing for both of them. 29 years is a long time to put up with a mostly unhappy situation. Since I was already out of the house by then (in an off-campus apartment at college), the only thing that affected me was that I have very few momentos from my childhood (where can you store stuff in a tiny college apartment that you share with 3 other guys?). So, my memories of my childhood are only in my brain. Over time, those memories have faded. Lately, I seem to remember less and less about the details of my childhood, just a high level summary of the events. I'm hoping that it is not due to the fact that there are not too many bad details. Of course, I'll never know.

In the first sentence of this post I mentioned two birthdays. The other one is mine, which is today. I hate the fact that I am sitting in a hotel room in Hotlanta and not with my family, but I'll be home late tonight. Later today, after sitting through an all-day meeting then partaking in the highly congested traffic of Atlanta (as I attempt to not make wrong turns on the way to the airport), I will meet my mother-in-law at the gate for the return trip. She happens to be heading to our house today, so I got her on the same flight back north. She is a really wonderful lady and quite active for being almost 84. I think we both get on each other's nerves after a few days (we're both set in our ways, I suppose), but I'll be working so it won't be bad at all. We actually got along really well on our trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming this summer. She paid for the entire trip for all of us, which was unbelievably generous of her. I know she enjoyed herself immensely, but so did Sue and I. It was the first time I really forgot about work in many years.