Joan's 75th

Last night Simone and I attended Joan's 75th birthday. Ordinary? Not really. Joan circles the globe every couple of years it seems. One daughter has homes in Manhattan and Paris. Another daughter does UN work in Africa. Another daughter, I don't recall what she does but it's important. One son-in-law is an international journalist whose feature stories appear in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, that ilk. The other son-in-law has a technology firm and told a truly amusing-slash-scary tale of being stranded in Samara (Russia) when his jet's reverse thruster failed. Worst case: his bribes-wrangler was nowhere to be found, and Jim had $20,000 US secreted in his underwear. Last year, this happened? At our table: the librarian who took a post-retirement post setting up Dubai's university library system. Interesting place, Dubai: you never meet a native (there are only 200,000); it's all ex-pat and more modern than Disney World. The room was full of people who knew Dubai. Understand, we were seated in the University Club, in Providence, RI. The club is a former bastion of male Anglo privilege. Within recent memory, wimmen were not allowed thru the front door. History now. Most of Joan's friends, seems, are named Susan, oddly enough. I traded cedar waxwing sightings with the former ambassador to Nigeria, our friend, Bill and his artist wife, Susan (there's that name again); Susan's awfully good, but has given up the gallery rat race. That morning trimming brush out by the 250-million-year old gabbro extrusion behind our house I heard determined rustling. Looked up. A rumptious flock of cedar waxwings -- crest, black eye stripe, safety yellow band across their tails -- ripped the blue berries from a 15-foot cedar. Bill says they're migrating. And, while he has the state rock, Cumberlandite, an unusually heavy, slightly magnetic mineral, on his land; he's baldly jealous of my gabbro -- "rotten rock" so-called because you can crumble it between your fingers -- which I use to fill ruts in my driveway.