Happiness and horrors......

Today is my friend V's 60th birthday...... I sent her a card and she eMailed me back, wondering how on earth I remembered after all these years. I don't think there had been a March 11th in all the un-connected years that I didn't remember. She and I always did something special for one another's birthdays... and by 'special,' I mean just a little something-- either buying a favorite record (a 45) as a gift, or going out for a slice of pizza on the Avenue. And V remembered my birthday-date as well, so we were both thinking of one another even though we'd lost touch. (Kids today probably don't know what a '45' is.)

Speaking of The Avenue, now that was a special place. If you couldn't find what you were looking for on or near Jamaica Avenue in Queens, then you either didn't need it or it didn't exist. Everyone would walk from one end of that avenue to another, staying in your own neighborhood for the most part, and there were department stores (Macy's, Gertz, Lerner's, May's, Robert Hall) and hundreds of speciality shops (small individual stores selling just shoes, or just gloves, or just hats). I cannot even count how many times V and I walked up and down Jamaica Avenue from 171st Street to Parsons Blvd., and then back again. (And who ever heard of a 'Shopping Mall' back in the 1960s?)


More happiness.... my husband was asked to give the Keynote Commencement Address at the university for the Spring graduation in May. Public speaking is his forte, and he can probably do this extremely well with very little notice. As it is, he's been thinking of all sorts of topics and ideas, bouncing them off me to see what I think. As with everything, he'll think it all through carefully and come up with an inspirational speech that will have everyone on their feet when he's done.


And horrors...... while I was up late last night watching the news on CNN about the 8.9 earthquake in Japan, my cousin F was also wide awake because she couldn't sleep at 2:00 in the morning...... and she was watching the same CNN videos that I was watching. Horrible, just horrible. So many homes and vehicles and boats and buildings, and heaven only knows how many people, just churning and swirling in a whirlpool of the tsunami waves that crashed into Japan after the earthquake struck. Children in schools on one side of the bridges, parents at work on the other side...... neither one able to get to the other. All I could think about last night as I tried to fall asleep were the little kids crying for their parents. As I type this, it's the middle of the night in Japan. I hope, if they're even able to get some sleep, that they wake up to a better day.