Last Round-Up

We will soon be loading up the car and heading into San Antonio. It's a somewhat emotional day. Of course, I won't be too emotional to stop at Rudy's BBQ as we approach the city limits ...or stop at the new Off Fifth or Nordstrom's Rack, but it's a time of return.

As they say in literary circles: someone comes to town; someone leaves town.

I left here just about a year and a half ago, headed to San Diego and what was surely an adventure ...although not one with the happy ending I was expecting. Now I am back in Junction, Texas in the same Best Western where it all began. It is my personal philosophy that all things go round.

It is also my Grandma Jessie's birthday. I thik she would be 108. I am good with remembering birthdays, but especially hers as I was shocked as a child to learn that she did not know her real birthday. I thought that was impossible. She explained to me in her little village in The Vale, then part of Russia, she was born on the second day of Passover and that's her real birthday.

This means she has a lunar birthday which moves, it also means that when she came into the U.S. as a six year old child with her name pinned to her dress, she needed a birthday.

I mention this because over the years I have met many immigrants. Invariably their birthday falls on the 30, 31rst or 1rst of every month. I had a girlfriend in LA, born in a DP camp after WWII, who was part of a family of five. Mother, father and siblings all had birthdays in different months but on the first day of that month.

So I celebrate the years of wandering, I celebrate my return to the house I own. Thehosue I bought about a mile from my father so I could be nearby for his final years. We buried him about a year and a half ago and I left town shortly thereafter. When I return, it is in time to bury my girlfriend's father. I have known her since we were 13 years old. And I know her birthday.

There were fields of bluebonnets on the roadside and so we celebrate spring. It will be Passover in a week. But I'll get to more outlets before then.