It’s my birthday, too, yeah.
For us adoptees, birthdays are a time of mixed emotions. This day was one of the better ones.
I won a prize from my youngest grandchild’s nursery school fund-raising raffle, got a greeting card from an old friend in Ohio and a great e-card from my closest friend on the Cape, a nice phonecall from my son and treated myself to a seafood dinner at Cooke’s and a Carvel ice cream cake.
I spent the day well, with people I like and have known for a long time at a software development company in Hyannis, doing the thing I like best, making a living as a computer programmer.
I don’t think of my birthday as just one day; like the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II, it becomes a multi-day celebration, mostly because schedules of family and friends are such that everything couldn’t be coordinated on the actual natal date. There’ll be a party tomorrow, a brunch on Sunday, and cake at Peter’s house sometime this weekend, whenever we can fit it in.
There’s some satisfaction in reflecting over this last year as a job generally well done. I met my only surviving aunt and her husband; got beach portraits made of the grandkids; “grew” the User Group to over 150 members; planted a few more bulbs in the garden; got to know a few nice, interesting people, some of whom I can now count as friends, and one or two of whom shared the kind of wisdom that becomes life-altering.