{"id":106,"date":"2006-07-31T20:29:51","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T00:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=106"},"modified":"2006-07-31T20:29:51","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T00:29:51","slug":"sweet-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=106","title":{"rendered":"Sweet 56"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is my birthday today. <\/strong>I am 56 years old.<\/p>\n

The temperature got up to 100\u00b0 today.<\/p>\n

These two facts are not unrelated. I\u2019m a hot day\u2019s child, born under the Dog Star. Like most summer babies (in my unscientific experience), I handle heat a lot better than cold. Weather like today\u2019s is an irritant, but it doesn\u2019t prostrate me. I put on a light-colored hat and go about my business.<\/p>\n

They had a goodbye party for someone at work today, and in the course of it somebody said, \u201cIt\u2019s your birthday, too, isn\u2019t it?\u201d I conceded the fact and they sang The Song for me.<\/p>\n

My brother Moloch called me at work, because I\u2019d been out of town over the weekend, when he usually calls. As the conversation wound down and he was jockeying to hang up, I asked, \u201cIs this my birthday call?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh yeah. It\u2019s your birthday, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he asked. So he wished me a happy one.<\/p>\n

Moloch doesn\u2019t believe in cards, so he usually calls for my birthday. Brother Baal sends a card, and generally calls too. My friend Chip, who was born about a week after me, usually sends a card, but he forgot last year and I haven\u2019t seen anything this year. My hero this time around is my uncle Orv, who not only sent a card, but included a nice \u201chousewarming gift\u201d inside it. Public thanks to him (he reads this blog).<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, contemplating the likelihood I recognized even then, that I\u2019d never find a wife, one thing I didn\u2019t anticipate about single life was that a day would come when my birthday would not show up very large on any living person’s radar screen.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, when you get into your fifties you don\u2019t care much about it anymore, yourself.<\/p>\n

It was hot in Decorah, Iowa, too,<\/strong> over the weekend. It was the hottest, stickiest Nordic Fest anyone remembered, and the crowds were widely dispersed\u2014most of them miles away in their own homes. Even a lot of the vendors didn\u2019t show up. We Vikings sat panting in the shade. The first day we couldn\u2019t even work up the energy to do any live steel combat.<\/p>\n

We did do some (wisely without armor) on the second day, and felt much the better for it. If my subjective scorekeeping is accurate, I seem to be the Number Two swordsman in our group, which I still find bizarre beyond words.<\/p>\n

When it was all over, I felt like I\u2019d spent the weekend baling hay, rather than sitting around in the shade of my awning, laboring greatly only over setting up tents, tearing them down again, and engaging in a spot of healthy recreational mayhem.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be doing it again on Saturday (hopefully without the extreme heat). We\u2019re doing a town anniversary celebration in Bode, Iowa, and the guy heading up the celebration was in Decorah to visit us. He made a point of coming to me three separate times to tell me that he\u2019d shown an internet photo of me and my equipment to the town fathers, and they\u2019d all said \u201cWe want that guy here.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice to be wanted. One would prefer, for preference, to be wanted by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, but it\u2019s nice to be wanted by anyone.<\/p>\n

On top of that, I talked to the distant relative I\u2019d contacted last week, and he gave me the genealogical information I needed for Cousin Trygve in Norway. He also extended an invitation to the family reunion, which is in Belmond, Iowa, just down the road from Bode, on Sunday. That seemed like a sign from God that He wanted me to attend both, and I\u2019m not so sanctified in my personal walk that I can afford to refuse a divine clue-bat.<\/p>\n

Especially when I\u2019m this old.
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It is my birthday today. I am 56 years old. The temperature got up to 100\u00b0 today. These two facts are not unrelated. I\u2019m a hot day\u2019s child, born under the Dog Star. Like most summer babies (in my unscientific experience), I handle heat a lot better than cold. Weather like today\u2019s is an irritant, … Continue reading Sweet 56<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[728,962,3257],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-decorah-nordic-fest","tag-festival","tag-viking"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}