Today is, as they say, the first day of the next year of my life. Yesterday was my birthday. So what did I do? I started the day by getting my car washed. I live only a couple of miles from the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which do more business than most other ports in the whole world. That means we’ve got diesel trucks galloping up and down the 710 freeway, which goes from the ports, through west Long Beach, and up toward L.A. and Pasadena, with freeway interchanges that lead all over the U.S. They’re working hard to make the trucks cleaner, but there’s still a lot of dust and crud that wafts across the skies. (We also get that nice marine layer, which at least keeps it marginally cooler than it is inland. I wish I could send cooling vibes to everyone I know who lives anywhere east of the Rockies.) Something else that keeps my car dirty--I also live two or three blocks from Fire Station #2. So fire engines go up and down Walnut Avenue every day. More dust. More crud. I haven’t been out to look at my car yet this morning, but I’m willing to bet it’s not shiny clean anymore. Sigh.
The second thing I did for my birthday was take two slices of red velvet cake with me to visit my friend Anniitra. We’re twins. Well, she’s a large, wonderfully talented black woman, and I’m a short white woman, and I’m five years older than she is, but we share a birthday and have been friends for many years. We ate our cake and had a nice gossip.
Then I did something I do maybe once a year. I went shopping. When I first moved to SoCal in 1976, my friend Rebecca took me to South Coast Plaza. Often. Once we spent an eight-hour day there. But as the years have passed, I’ve become less fond of malls, and now they make me crazy. They’re too noisy! Though I’ve been a Nordstrom customer, off and on, since the 1980s, I don’t wear their clothes anymore because I don’t work in offices anymore. But I like their shoes and some other things. Yesterday, I bought a new leather wallet. Then I ventured into the mall. I actually managed not to get lost this time. When I found La Parfumerie, I bought another bottle of the only perfume I wear, Vanilla Fields. My next stop was down the freeway, where I stopped to buy some chocolate-hazelnut truffles, then I stopped at a local metaphysical bookstore, Points of Light, to leave some flyers for Secret Lives, and then I went by the bank. Back home. I spent the afternoon working. Some editing, some writing, some reading. I’m honored to be on the board of a new Goddess publisher named Goddess Ink, and I’ve got a submitted manuscript to read and comment on for them.
In the middle of the afternoon, the phone rang twice. The first call was from my son, and we had one of our usual interesting literary conversations. Later it rang again. “Happy birthday to you…..” This was my friend B.J. calling from Georgia. I first “met” her when she sent me a fan letter for one of my books maybe a decade ago, and she was one of the people who helped get me through the death of my first Heisenberg. We’ve been friends ever since, and a couple weeks ago as I was writing a piece called “When the Goddess Calls” for one of the Llewellyn 2013 annuals and decided that the Goddess can send text messages, it was B.J. I asked if I was spelling the text messages correctly. Yes, that’s an oxymoron. She said I got ’em right. Yesterday we talked for an hour.
I finished my birthday by watching my DVD of the San Francisco Opera’s 2001 production of The Merry Widow, which I love, followed by about an hour of a Michael Ball DVD. Then it was bedtime. It occurs to me that some people might think I a dull birthday to you, but to me it was perfectly satisfactory.
You want to know how obsessive I can get? (Just ask my authors.) Earlier in the week, I turned on TCM and watched Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. At one point in Anna Karenina, Vronsky exclaims, “Anna!” As he said that, I heard an echo in my head. But it wasn’t Fredric March’s voice. “Anna!” There was a bit of music with it. Well, this happens to me all the time. I’ll frequently wake up in the morning with 20 or 30 seconds of music running in my head. It’s usually Gilbert and Sullivan, and I can identify it pretty quickly. But this “Anna!” had me stumped. It went on auto-repeat and I finished the movie and went to bed. Next morning, it was still there and I still couldn’t figure out who was exclaiming. So I did what I often have to do: I stood in front of my DVD shelves and looked at the spines of all the musicals. Aha! There it was. In Act I of The Merry Widow, Anna Glawari (the Widow) finds Prince Danilo asleep in the Pontevedrian embassy. They were lovers when they were young, but the prince is now a mere civil servant, whereas she’s a very rich widow. “Danilo!” “Anna!” Mystery solved. That's why I watched The Merry Widow.
I also spent an hour or so yesterday replying to birthday greetings on Facebook. With nearly every “many thanks,” I also asked, “Have you been to my Secret Lives page yet?” Since last month, I’ve had two really smart women reading the Secret Lives pdf and finding more typos. I went through the whole pdf, too, and made some small changes, then ……. holding my breath, I let my baby go and sent it back to Sherry. The next thing I have to do today is work on the “preanswered” Q&A for the book, which I will send to my blog tour promoter. Like I said last month, I never complain about being busy. Everything I’m working on is entertaining and interesting. (I’m tempted to look in the thesaurus for some nice, obscure synonyms for interesting, but I’ll spare you that. I am forever advising my authors to stay away from the thesaurus.)