Birthday Bliss
Thank you, dear friends and family, for the joyful birthday wishes. I’ve been showered with so much love these past few weeks that I’m dubbing it “birthmonth”! This has turned out to be one of the most satisfying birthday commemorations thus far, topping waking up to croissants in Paris last year. And it seems I’m on a roll with my ‘another year, another country’ goal: 25th in Paris, 24th in Israel, 23rd in New Zealand, and 22nd in Kiribati. This year I am, of course, in California, Amuurica (and one day will stop saying it with that silly slur). It’s not a consciously set goal, it just happens to be a busy, unsettled time in my life (the good kind of unsettled).
As it turns out, I am marrying a closeted romantic. Oli is not typically one for such overtures but he has tickled me recently with happy surprises and gifts. One day I arrived home to find a newly-published book by one of my favorite writers sitting on our coffee table ( Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘The Signature of All Things’). I had been harping on about it for weeks and following its pre-release events with rapture. Oli told me that purchasing that book was a divinely-inspired act: mention of the book was made twice on NPR while he was running errands, the second time he happened to be driving past a Barnes & Noble bookstore. Clearly NPR, and the universe, was trying to tell him something! How could he NOT stop in and purchase a copy? *Love this man, and NPR, and the mysterious forces in the universe*
Last week Oli took me out on a surprise date. Well, the surprise factor was the event after our meal at a down-town Indian restaurant. We drove over to the Fox Theatre in Oakland for…a Jack Johnson concert! I had introduced Oli to Jack several months prior and we had run the Jack Johnson station on Pandora throughout our mini-vacation in Monterey in August (fun fact: I learnt from JJ himself, at this concert, that his wife is from Monterey. Thus many members of his/her family were in the audience). Jack Johnson is as modest, gracious, and wholesome as ever. I really appreciate that about him, his music, and his performances. When I was a wildly obsessed teen living for a time in his homeland, Hawaii, I would spend countless hours biking up and down his neighborhood on the North Shore of Oahu hoping to catch a glimpse of the Johnson clan. I was smitten. But the closest I ever got was meeting a woman who worked at the local Starbucks and had served his mom. Still, I took that.
This morning, the morning of my 26th, Oli dotingly brought me a cup of tea so I could catch up on some reading and writing. So here I am — at home, propped up in bed, armed with a cuppa and a laptop. (Oli snapped this — photo below — on our new Fujifilm Instax camera we’ll be using for our wedding guestbook shots). Apparently there are more birthday surprises to come. My heart is about ready to burst. *Birthday bliss*.
