Birthday girls

by chuckofish

Today is our mother’s birthday. She would have been 92! It seems impossible that she has been gone thirty years. Well, gone, but certainly not forgotten.

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“There is so little to remember of anyone – an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.”

–Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

This year I will turn the age our mother was when she died. It is a strange feeling.

I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

–Patti Smith, M Train 

Yes, indeed, how did we get so damn old?

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and her book in my hands. Like a lot of things in my life, I’d just about worn it out, but it was worn out with love, and that’s the best kind of worn-out there is. Maybe we’re like all those used cars, broken hand tools, articles of old clothing, scratched record albums, and dog-eared books. Maybe there really isn’t any such thing as mortality; that life simply wears us out with love.

–Craig Johnson, Kindness Goes Unpunished

Well, I didn’t mean to get all serious, but, you know, sometimes we do.

P.S.  Big congratulations to our other birthday girl Dolly Parton,
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who was recognized in the Guinness World Records 2018 edition for earning the records for most decades with a Top 20 hit on the US Country Songs chart as well as most hits on the U.S. Hot Country Songs chart by a female artist. You go, girl!

Hey, it’s Friday! Have a good weekend!