Happy Birdbath to Me

It was my birthday earlier this month and the Dow dropped nearly 400 points (my coworker and I keep a bit of an eye on this, she because she doesn’t want her portfolio to decline and me because I’m waiting for civilization to grind completely to a halt), but for me, it was a super day.

For one thing, I found out about a company my place of employment has a contract with for responsible disposal of computer hardware. You can go to this company’s website, describe your item or items—the person I talked to said they will come and pick up one computer cable, literally, though that probably wouldn’t be very environmentally friendly—and take it away to be inventoried.

If my company can use the thing elsewhere, great. If not, the disposal company will resell it, or recycle as much of it as possible. The particular group that arranges to have the hardware picked up gets billed, but my boss she considers it absolutely appropriate to incur this cost.

Also, a nice lady had ordered me some CDs from Amazon which arrived on that very day. How did that nice lady know just what I like? She got it exactly right, from the Gino Vannelli to the Seether to the Blood, Sweat & Tears to the Three Days Grace to the Todd Rundgren. Nice work, nice lady! I think she’s going to treat me to a few iTunes, too, such as “The Cheater,” by Bob Kuban and the In-Men and No Doubt’s “Hella Good” and Chris Whitley’s “Big Sky Country.”

Since I make a point of eating my favorite foods all the time and having a juicy stack of unread books ready to go and visiting my favorite restaurants regularly and there were two DVDs on the shelf I’d meant to watch for weeks, I couldn’t think of anything in particular to do for my birthday—Tom was out of town and David and Lisa are in Seattle—but remembered that I could use some new felt markers, so I went to FLAX and got a set of Pentel markers, and also several single markers.

As if that weren’t an obscene amount of riches already, that morning I was cycling along Valencia St. on my way to work when I heard a friendly “Hello” and there was Mily. What was she doing there? We may never know, because I’m far too polite to ask, but it was a nice surprise to see her.

That night, David and Lisa called me and we talked at length, which is always fun, though every time I commented on the lovely weather we enjoy here in San Francisco, which I did find occasion to mention several times, David shrieked, “F*ck YOU!” and Lisa had to remind him that the purpose of the call had been to wish me a happy birthday. She, of Southern California extraction, has adjusted to Seattle just fine, but David, originally of a colder clime, is still wrestling with it; we speculated that maybe there is a lifetime quota for gloomy days and David has already hit his.

Usually my parents call and sing “Happy Birthday,” but this year they didn’t. I didn’t assume any actual malice, but I still felt a little bereft. The next day, Saturday, I called my mother, who said she made some security adjustments to her computer I’d recommended, and now she was having to accept or reject a cookie every three seconds. I said, “I guess you were so angry about it that you didn’t want to sing me ‘Happy Birthday.’” (Yes, I am 46 years old.)

She said, with mock sympathy, “I suppose you didn’t have a happy birthday because we didn’t sing to you,” and explained that they’d thought of it early in the day, but had ended up forgetting.

Later in the conversation, she suddenly said, “Oh, all right,” and sang me a hilarious ultra-twanging version of “Happy Birthday” (“happy biiiirthday tew yewwww”) that would make Granny of the Beverly Hillbillies sound like an urban sophisticate in comparison.

And they had sent a card with a little something inside, and David and Lisa sent a very funny card, and they also sang, and a few other folks sent cards, and on the whole, it was a very happy birthday.