Last week I turned 58. The birthdays all seem to be one big blob now. The exuberant 16th, 18th and 21st are long forgotten milestones. Thirty, forty and fifty were, I guess, somewhat noteworthy. But now, I don’t think much about them. The writer Richard Ford referred to this stage of life as “the permanent period” in his novel “The Lay of the Land.” That seems about right.

It’s not that there aren’t things to look forward to. Or that every year will be the same. Or that there is no significance in 58. For one thing, I like the look and sound of the number 58 better than 57. So that’s something.

Another is that my father was 58 when he had a massive heart attack. He lived, I’m happy to say. But it took months before he recovered to the point where he could go in for quadruple bypass surgery, and then recover again. It was my first awakening to mortality, and my first full appreciation of how much I loved him, and just what a good guy he was.

So I thought about that. And I received some simple but priceless little messages—emails, texts—from my old friends, near and far. My college roommate whom I don’t see often enough. My nephew, whom I’ll never see often enough for my satisfaction. My good friends from my days living in Northern Virginia and working in D.C.

Of course, there’s Beth, who loves her birthday so much that she’s taught me how to enjoy my own. I’m always happy to see one more year together on the horizon.

And that’s what birthdays are good for these days. Gratitude. Deep, enveloping gratitude—it’s no substitute for spry youth, but spry youth isn’t a substitute for it, either. And it’s this kind of gratitude that, I think, can only be earned, felt, and understood over some significant time and living as well as one can.

This permanent period ain’t all bad.

You might recognize my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway’s name: she is principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. Lynn wrote a guest post here after Whitney and I visited her kids’ elementary school, and your fun comments to that post helped encourage her to start a blog of her own called Backwards and in High Heels. Read these excerpts from a post she published there last Tuesday and you’ll discover that Lynn’s new blog is going to be about more than music:

One of the classrooms we visited at Lynn’s kids’ school. Hope the tooth fairy finds them when she needs to!

The title of Lynn’s June 2 post is Our Tooth Fairy Is A Lazy, Shiftless Hussy, and it starts like this:

Oh, the shame! I was walking past my kids’ room last night and on the bedroom door, there hung a note. It was addressed to our Tooth Fairy, that truant little bitch.

Here Lynn inserts a photo of the note her dauther wrote. Seeing, ahem, as I can’t see photos, I was ever-so-grateful Lynn spelled out the words on the note, too. She writes, “If you can’t decipher kids’ scrawl, here it is spellchecked, for your reading pleasure.”:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

Please come get my tooth. I have been waiting for 4 days.

From,
Sophie
Top Bunk

Lynn speakes out “on behalf of beleaguered Tooth Fairies everywhere” when she admits she didn’t even know Sophie had lost a tooth. “It apparently happened the night I had a concert, so go ahead and throw a big heap of Workin’ Mama Guilt on top of this Shame Sandwich,” She writes. “Our partially-toothless daughter had been suffering in silence, waiting patiently for three nights before she even let us know she had a tooth under her pillow!” Back to the excerpt:

When she finally told us about it, I was horrified and said many nasty things about our Tooth Fairy that I now regret: how she is unreliable; takes to drinking under stress and blacking out for days and nights on end; how after she’s been to the house to collect teeth, I notice little things, like jewelry and loose change, have gone missing. Maybe, in retrospect, I laid it on a little too thick but I wanted her to understand who we’re dealing with here.

So back to me. Is Sophie’s fairy tale ruined for life? Will she start therapy soon? Or does the tooth fairy elbow out the evil mother? Do Sophie’s GPS coordinates finally lead the fairy to the upper bunk? I guess you’ll just have to link to the shiftless hussy blog post on Backwards in High Heels to find out for yourself. Welcome to blogland, Lynnie

Forty years ago this summer I graduated from high school, I was working at the candy and nut counter at Sears at the local mall, and I spent my summer anticipating just what life at the University of Illinois would be like. I also met my newborn nephew for the first time, and changed my first diaper.

I’d never so much as dipped a toe in the ocean, and Lake Michigan was the biggest body of water I’d ever seen or swam in. But, like a gazillion other people that summer, I was terrified and mesmerized by a Great White Shark.

Ahh, the summer of 1975.

I saw Jaws at a movie theater in downtown Chicago with my high school girlfriend. It was quite the exotic date for us back then. I can still hear the collective gasp and see the simultaneous physical recoil of the entire audience when the disfigured head of an ill-fated fisherman floated down right in front of Richard Dreyfus’ character.

And I pretty much have never tired of it. It’s a running joke in our household: “Jaws is on!” I’ll say. Beth will then say “I’ll see you later.”

I cannot get enough of that movie. And I’ve been fascinated by sharks ever since seeing Jaws in 1975. Gus, Beth and I lived on the oceanfront in North Carolina in the 1990s and though I spent hours gazing at the sea, I never saw a shark. I knew they were out there, though. My fear didn’t keep me from swimming in the ocean and body surfing, though I would get a shudder from time to time thinking about a big one maybe swimming around out there.

My other lifetime fascination and terror — since childhood — has been tornadoes. I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I’m
being chased by a tornado that I just can’t shake. As with sharks, I have this deep fear but also this perverse desire to see one, for real. (I promise, though, I had nothing to do with Sharknado.)

Back to Jaws. I was thrilled to read this the other day. On the 40th anniversary of its release, Jaws is going to be shown in movie theaters across the country, including here in Chicago.

And I’m going to party like its 1975.

When my talking computer read today’s Writer’s Almanac out loud to me this morning, I discovered that the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on this day in 1922. My mother, Flo, was born before the Lincoln Memorial? Whoa. I thought the Lincoln Memorial had been around since, well, since the Emancipation Proclamation or something. The Writer’s Almanac says that the monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914. Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, but the almanac reports that the audience at the 1922 dedication — more than 50,000 people — was segregated. From the almanac:

Keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. just over 40 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of an audience of 200,000.

It’s nearly a year since Flo died, but I still find myself forgetting and picking up the phone to call her to tell her something. More often, to ask her a question. She was born in 1916, which makes her six years old when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. On today’s phone call –or during a visit — I’d tell her all I’d learned from the Writer’s Almanac about the Lincoln Memorial, and then start in with my questions:

• Do you remember them dedicating the Lincoln memorial?
• When you were in school, did they teach you about the memorials in Washington, D.C.?
• I guess there really weren’t a whole lot of memorials on the mall back then, did they talk much about them at all in school?
• If the Lincoln Memorial wasn’t built yet, what was on the back of the five dollar bill when you were born?

I’ll never know the answers. For one, Flo would have just laughed at that last question, and if you wanna know the truth, I probably wouldn’t know the answers to the other questions even if she was still here to pick up the phone. Flo was never one to talk about her own experiences much. I’d ask a question, she’d shrug (and yes, you can hear a shrug over the telephone) and say no, she really doesn’t remember much about that historical event. From there, she’d veer off on a related story, nearly always about someone other than herself. Today’s call might have evolved into a recollection of a trip Mike and I took with her once to see Pick and Hank in Washington, D.C. “ohhhh, their place is so beautiful,” she’d exclaim. “That kitchen — it was like Hollywood!” She’d wax poetic over the magnificent dinner Hank put together for us and the piano tunes Pick played afterward. “That was really something.” Calls with Flo were like that. She appreciated her childhood and her upbringing, but rather than dwell on details of the past, she focused on other people, what was going on now, in the present. Are pick and Hank still in that place? Are they coming out for a visit? Have you seen them lately? How are they doing? She’d want us to say hello to them, of course, and she always phoned when a holiday card came in the mail from them, or from anyone else I knew, for that matter. Cards in the mail were truly red-letter days for Flo. Hearing her gush about those cards? I may not have realized it then, but now I know. Those were red-letter days for me. And that’s what I Miss about our visits and the random phone calls with Flo. They were simple reminders to enjoy the people around us, appreciate the time we have with them, and let them know they’re loved. Most important: share great meals with friends when you can, and never miss an opportunity to gather around a piano to belt out an old tune.

A writer in the Monday memoir-writing class I lead grew up in Germany, came to America through a study abroad program at Vassar, and stayed. Brigitte has retired from a career in academia now, and twice a week she volunteers in a third-grade class at a Chicago Public School.

The kids at Swift had a lot of energy and questions.

Nearly all the students in Brigitte’s third-grade class at Swift School are children of immigrants, and to celebrate the end of a successful year, Brigitte ordered every one of them a copy of my children’s book, Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound and had me come over last Friday to meet them all.

I was captivated by the children’s curiosity. Without being able to see them, I forgot that the nine- and ten-year olds in Brigitte’s class might look different from any of the kids in the other classes Whitney and I have visited this past school year. Maybe you can tell from the questions they asked?

• How old is your dog?
• If she is only five, why is she sleeping?
• How old are you?
• How come you got diabetes?
• Has life changed for you now, you know,because you’re blind?
• How do you cook?
• How do you fry?
• You never said what the building was like where your dog went to school. How old is the school it went to?
• Was it hard for you and your dog at first, you know, when it got to Chicago?
• Would you have a dog if you never got blind?
• Is your day ever very challenging?
• Does your dog have a dad?

That last question was one I’d never been asked before. Yes, I explained, my dog does have a dad. A mom, too. “One of them is a Golden Retriever, and the other is a Yellow Labrador Retriever,” I said. “They still live in New Jersey, that’s where my dog was born.”

After hearing my anser, the girl who’d asked the question said, “I think your dog is sad, because it misses the family it grew up with.” And that’s when I remembered. These kids had parents from different countries. Maybe that little girl’s response about my dog being sad, and the question about life being challenging, and whether or not my dog had a hard time when it first moved to Chicago…those questions might stem from something they hear their parents say from time to time at home.

These third-graders were mature beyond their years, but they were fun, too. And smart. Thanks for asking us to come to Swift School, Brigittte, and for seeing to it that each and every one of those kids got a book to bring home. Whitney and I had a ball.