the big three-oh

in honor of my birthday, i guess i might as well blog a bit. it's been a while since i've felt writerly, which is of course the case because now i actually have time to write. and it's not as if there hasn't been much grist for the mill, including sailing around the chesapeake for a couple of days with drew's parents and a wonderful surprise birthday dinner cooked up by becca, featuring crabcakes, corn pudding and chocolate fondue - really lovely. and this morning, another wonderful surprise - kim had made a nectarine breakfast cake with three candles for each decade i've been around, and she, joel and i enjoyed it with homemade lattes before she decamped for work. i am so lucky to have such delicious family and friends.

i share a birthday with someone who was perhaps a little less lucky. marilyn monroe would have been EIGHTY today. can you believe it? i knew we had the same birthday but didn't know we were exactly a half-century apart. not that that's really relevant to anything; it's more intriguing to think of what she might be like now if she had lived, whether she might have ever come to be happy with herself.

on a less pop-psychy note, my mom's old friend jon katz has an article in slate today about "grunt and grumble," the patois of rural america. his work is always wonderfully funny - he often writes about dogs and life on his upstate new york farm. my favorite story about jon is that he met his wife, paula span - also a writer - at a vietnam protest. he was playing a war victim on a gurney and she was playing a medic. classic.