Happy Birthday!!!

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it will be the longest day of the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it."
--The Great Gatsby.

I feel Daisy Buchanan's pain on this one. I always watch for Robin's birthday and then miss it. Why should this year be any different? At least her husband remembers, that's the main thing.

Robin is measuring her life out in truffles. I know the sensation, minus truffles; the feeling that your days are numbered. (And it is not a large number.) That the days of the life you knew will soon run out, and some entirely different life, as yet unknown, will be starting. Oh yes. I've been there; that feeling is no stranger to me.

Happy Birthday, Robin! Happy trails in your new life! If no one else is happy for you, I will be happy for you. Soon this hell of moving will end, and you will be starting everything over. Settling in, learning new things. And it will be great.

Today I got home well before dark,a beautiful spring day in Brooklyn with dogwood and forsythia out, (but the nonflowering trees still leafless, wintery) and we walked up to the promenade on Brooklyn Heights. The light on the water, the view of Lady Libery and the Brooklyn Bridge! After turning off the promenade we strolled on Montague Street, the main commercial street in Brooklyn Heights, and I felt like I was in Paris, somehow, except that all the signs were in English. The old stone churches, the sidewalk cafes, the brownstones.... It had this enchanted, limpid quality, and it seemed that everything I gave up was worth it, that I had no regrets, just to be alive in this moment.