It is my Birthday and I Love Every Minute of It

My blog is to be about culture: concerts, exhibits, travels, history, and such —and today it is "all about me". How immodest, how in sharp disagreement with my Eastern-European upbringing where self-effacement, modesty, and suppressed self-promotion prevails. I am rebellious to it all, today and just today.

So, here comes my midnight musing just for me, but you are welcome to join me.

I collect aprons and I happily show them off daily, as I love to cook. I like my house full of scent of food, fresh ginger in grape-seed oil is the best, but I do not mind even stenchy boiling cauliflower.

Weekend is for baking and how I love it is hard to express, trying new recipe is the thing, elaborate ones especially — when you have to do this, then that, and then even that....

And I love to jog, all alone, just me and my thoughts, never training for marathon, as races freak me out. I am the clumsy one in my athletic family, I am used to the underdog position and it never bothered me. God gave me desire, but did not supply talent, but I reconciled that a long time ago and I happily press forward alone in my own tempo.

Yoga, that uncompetitive gentle companion, is my daily island of calm. Skiing a torrent of winter  excitement. Paddle boarding my water garden of joy.

I love to play piano, my talent may not be rare, but I play, and play loud, never apologizing for those wrong chords, I just keep it up as long as the harmony is found.

And then, there is the garden. Every day after my jog I go to my garden with scissors in my pocket and a white small bucket for weedings. I touch all of the colorful beauty, I trim, I harvest, I weed, I touch again, I hug, I rejoice!

I love to sing. When a teenager I loudly declared that whoever wants to marry me must play guitar. Music scares sadness away and it just happened that my companion does play guitar and there is noone else in the world I make music rather than with my kind man! And yes, we even have a band, named after our literary street, that is named after a poet from Baltimore that loved to repeat "Nevermore".

I love to hang my laundry, I love even more to take the laundry down, sniffing each article as it smells like my grandma's sheets, simple household tasks remind me of my grandma who had such a hard life that she used to tell me while touching my long hair, "I would never ever want to be young again." How that had to be...

And for the same reason I love to iron. I admire the stack of perfectly pressed T-shirts, shirts, tea towels, skirts...I am happy I instilled in my kids to never leave a house in wrinkled cloth...some may bid ironing a waste of time, and I embrace that and even understand the culture of elegant negligence, but for me, pressed clothes put me in line with the elegance of my father and mother, with the neatness of my grandma... and... such tasks ground me, just like cooking, baking, polishing, gardening....and such.

And then there is my passion for traveling. Commies made sure I was closed in. My parents were rebels and that was a part of punishment. Once things changed, my husband and I turned traveling into a lifestyle and extended the beauty to our children. From China to Japan, from Finland to Spain, from Australia to Canada and Europe, those sights are my lucky lottery ticket!

I love to get people together, I love to spread the news of the beauty of music, the beauty of theater, the beauty of children dancing, singing, creating together, the beauty of my heritage, a costumed and pony-tailed mother and daughter offering Moravian treats in Balboa Park, that would be one of Sunday afternoons of my choice.

I love my white and blue house that my husband built for us, I love my backyard that became my gym, my office, my living room,

my entertaining quarters, my workshop...

I love to read, I love to get to know people's thoughts, habits, customs, weaknesses and strengths so I can be more tolerant, understanding, or angry...!

My three kings:

My late father who ruled by kindness, meekness and humor.

My wonderful good-hearted fine brother who built a bookstore in the corner of a Renaissance square of a historical city. The stacks of books climb the walls up to the vaulted ceiling, it is my haven!

And finally my extraordinary man who may strike you as unassuming guy yet, he knows just about everything: how things work, how history went, how life is to be handled.

And my queen, my beautiful mother who is so busy in her eighth decade of rich life that I can barely catch up with her. If she is

not in a yoga position, she is in a language school taking lessons, or perhaps at a rehearsal of her choir, maybe she is swimming in the river or visiting a nearby castle.

I love to be a mother my children who became my companions, nevertheless that list of daily chores is still in fashion around here! They do not mind to hurt on a sport field where they spit blood to reach that finish line first or last. They have a heart where it suppose to be, a right dose of empathy&modesty, thirst for life, and a skill to jazz up a dull moment with their saxes and guitars.

I love poetry and I try to read a poem a day, as my wonderful professor Kala suggested when I was sixteen...Imagine, said he, a poem a day...and when you are thirty, forty, fifty, imagine how many poems you have read...

My glass of red Italian wine is almost empty. My blog is almost too long. My birthday is almost here.

With my midnight glass, to you, my friends, my readers....to you, without whom there would hardly be any fun for me out there. You make me happy: on my birthday and every day!