[€uroMeinke]

I’m looking swanky today. Black chords, lavender turtle neck, and my charcoal cashmere jacket. The jacket of course makes the outfit and defines my swankyness. It subdues the lavender which otherwise would be a bit too loud for the conservativeness of the workplace. Of course, I’m wearing it because I’ve been cold all week and I haven’t done laundry and was faced with a lavender turtleneck.

Of course, it’s raining now. I recall that was supposed to happen yesterday, and since it didn’t I never imagined that it might do that today. My cars a long way off. Now to find that umbrella with my department’s logo on it, so I can amble humiliated, yet dry and swanky back to my car where I can go home to enjoy the early starting weekend.

You’ll notice, I haven’t mentioned anything about work. It’s because I haven’t done any. We’ll I took a few phone calls, caught up with my colleague in Chicago, read my email, read LoT, various Live Journals, and traded a few IMs. I just want to go home right now. Because tomorrow, I took a vacation day and I want my vacation to start as soon as possible.

Age – These dang 28 year olds, those are playful years when the body still accommodates. Try 43, and age of no real meaning, other than, “He’s in his 40’s.” I’ve entered the realm where all that really matter of my age is what decade. Years, they pass all too quickly. Still, I resist being in my 40’s – I still want to play, to discover, to indulge – and somehow have managed to do so (as has, most thankfully, my wife)

More important still, today is my mother’s birthday. Seventy-seven years ago today she was born in a small town in Germany. Born scandalously soon after her parents marriage, she witnessed first hand the horrors of WWII as friends were murdered before her and whole neighborhoods were burned in liberation.

She was 17 when the war ended, and took a job assisting a lesbian couple’s photography business, where she learned to touch up boudoir pics, drink cognac, and smoke cigarettes. These are the times she thinks of with fondness and no regrets.

At 28, My mother had immigrated to Canada, where for a time she lived like a pioneer as my father worked the Alaskan Highway, her only company, a record player and a group of silent Indian women who would come sit next to her on her porch. But by 28, she was in cosmopolitan Vancouver, hanging with artists, writers, and self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who would never become successful.

At 43, she had immigrated again, now to America – and more importantly, California. Her husband, finally successful ( A Disney subcontractor mind you), making good money, completely unaware of the tumor, slowly growing, that would change their lives forever.

And I am her ungrateful son. Today she’ll not be fussed over, for she hates that so. But she’ll get a phone call, a chat, an ambiguously promised visit. No doubt, she’ll spend the day on her play station, driving that taxi, or watching a favorite film, like Quills. For she too still like to play, though her body now is much less forgiving than mine.