Daily Blague

Happy Birthday, Kathleen!

Happy Birthday to the woman who bewitched me with her voice - all unknowing - on the first day of orientation in 1977, when we were all starting law school. I saw her, yes, and she was very appealing, but I fell in love with her voice, and although that voice is very familiar now, it is still my standard for estimating heart, soul and spirit in the human character.

Kathleen is the rare woman who got to sow her wild oats before the onset of puberty - and, it must be averred, afterward. "Got to" is wrong, really. Nobody gave permission; Kathleen seized it. If you've seen Please Don't Eat The Daisies, then imagine what a huge Hefty bag full of water - how they got it out of the kitchen I'll never know - would do when dropped from the eighth floor of a building onto 96th Street. Atomic noise! Imagine being condemned to polish the floors of a cloistral corridor - and having the bright idea of inspiring your accomplice to emulate you in strapping the brushes to your feet and getting your booty down, to music on a small cassette recorder.  (I'm probably wrong about the cassette recorder; Kathleen provided her own radio station. You ought to hear her sing songs she hates - you want to go out and buy them!) Having done truly unspeakable things as a good little girl, Kathleen has been freed to be a Perfectly Decent Old Lady. One with a still fabulous smile.

Kathleen is 52 today. It seems hardly possible. I always thought that I alone would be the one to grow old. When I say that it wasn't supposed to happen to Kathleen, I don't mean that ageing has made her a different person. She remains, at heart and to me, a bold but feeling girl. But I see that I entertained a fantasy that I could do the ageing for the two of us.

Given my spotty recent health record, it would seem that I'll die before Kathleen. Death has certainly been much on my mind this year; if you've had my blood-pressure readings, you've been writing your will, too. Kathleen is terrified of life without me, because I do the dishes. But who knows? Maybe she'll find somebody marvelous, and in a postkitchen age. Maybe, on the other hand, she'll make me keep myself going.

And she kept her own name. Brava.