Self-portrait. Sunday. March 7, 2021. My birthday.

This is me, too. An old resume–a direct mail brochure. It got me my first job at Hearst Magazines. My cousin, Donna, sent it back to me as a way to wish me Happy Birthday. Read her comment:

This is the front, the mail side.

Check out the stamp! 15 cents!!!

Here’s the inside of the resume:

I hope you can read it. The baseball team? That’s my Little League team; Old Salt. Can you guess which one is me? All my childhood friends thought I was going to grow up to be a professional baseball player.

In addition to what is noted on the resume I have been a lifeguard, gardener, antique refinisher, short order cook. But never a professional baseball play. I did, however, coach my daughter’s softball team!

Back to my birthday. I made an updated version of Shrimp Scampi (olive oil, butter, shallot, garlic, crushed tomato, mild banana peppers, red pepper flakes, spinach, shrimp, linguine):

Susan made us a Chocolate Cake:

On my birthday, I always remember a poem by Dylan Thomas, “Poem In October. It begins:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Read more here:

It was read to me and a college friend by our English Literature professor when we were in college. This was when we were young and innocent and our hair was long and our future, like the grassy hill in Tarrytown, New York, over-looking the Hudson River, on which we sat cross-legged passing a joint, was and would be beautiful, perfect and pure, ever-changing changeless.