Mockingbird Hill Cottage

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Birthday Boy

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Happy Birthday to this dear, dear man.

The best man I’ve ever known, always growing, always working on himself, true blue friend to many, kind, compassionate, loving, hilarious, talented, GOOD.

Just plain good.

It goes without saying that he has made my life richer than I ever thought it could be. I don’t know what I did to deserve him but I am ever and always grateful for his presence in my life.

We’re coming up on 28 years together. Sometimes I wish we’d met sooner, but then I realize that we weren’t ready for each other until that moment of that day.

He doesn’t want anything special today, though of course he’ll open some presents and I’ll sing Happy Birthday to him. I think he just wants to hang out here in our little cottage.

Whatever you want, my love. Whatever you want.

It’s also Little Z’s 11th birthday!

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.

 

 

Comments

  1. Happy Birthday Don! I love hearing about you through Claudia’s blog. She’s right; you ARE a treasure. Enjoy your day.

  3. Happy Birthday
    Love watching you on the shows you were on
    Love your music
    Love the fact our adorable Claudia loves you so
    You are a blessing to her and others
    Thank you for sharing your gifts
    Prayers on your day

  5. Happy Birthday to your: talented actor, musician, photographer and much loved husband.
    Have a wonderful year, Don!
    Take Care,
    Kaye

  6. to don and little z … happy birthday! may it be a day full of your favorite things, spent exactly as you want and the start of a terrific year ahead for you and those you love!

    to claudia … what a lovely, loving tribute to don! and a great photo. happy day to you, too.

    kathy

  7. Happy Birthday to Don and Little Z! Wishing you a year filled with good health, lots of love, and fun adventures!

  10. Happy Birthday, Don! May this be an excellent year around the sun for Claudia & you both.
    Happy Birthday, Little-Z!

    I finally got caught up on your blog in a cooler moment in the middle of the night. Bless you and all others posting on your blog – such a wonderful oasis of love, kindness, and logical thought,
    Slava Ukraine – down with tyrants and tyrant-wanna-bees.

  11. Happy Birthday Don! I hope you thoroughly enjoy your day! We’ve enjoyed your pictures, your music, and your performances in many shows…may they all continue!

    Happy Birthday to Little Z! ;)

  12. Happy Birthday Don! Hope your special day is filled with lots of love, fun and laughter.

  15. Happy Birthday Don. I know your special day will be full of love, laughter
    and a present or two. Enjoy. 🇨🇦

  23. Happy Birthday Don! Wishing you all the best on your special day!
    Take care!

  25. Another trip around the sun! Happy birthday, Don! Hope your year is filled with music, art, love and happiness.

    LIttle Z, enjoy your special day!

  26. It’s nice to hear something so positive and sweet; biggest Happy Birthday to Don; he’s kinda ‘ours’ here on the blog, too. You’ve helped us ‘know’ him!

      • It must be SO NICE for you to hear him play the guitar, but also for him to be able to hear you sing. You two really are the couple of the century!

        Oh, that porch; what a spot to sit, savor the environment, feed the senses. Don looks relaxed.

        Hope you both have had a wonderful Friday, shutting out the world as much as you can so that the loveliness of the special day overtakes anything/everything else.

        Forgot to think of Z, sharing the day with Don; it’s special, isn’t it; and I hope your sister and her boys are continuing to settle in comfortably and securely.

  27. One of the reasons I said ‘so nice to hear’ is that I just came online at approaching noonish hour PST only to see the I-guess-sadly-expected overturn of Roe v Wade although at least there was SOME progress on gun legislation today. My husband said, “Be glad we’re in Calif” because we figure our progressive state will uphold laws about other stuff besides abortion, like gay marriage, etc when other states will unfortunately/likely follow the abortion ban with the ‘outlawing’ of same-sex marriage, etc (a cascading effect to come). The states will pick their rights; I’d just never known about this in my past, in terms of the power each individual U.S. state can exercise. All in all, it’s still like two steps forward and four steps backward. I really just still can’t wrap my head around the overturn of r v w; I’m of that ‘age’ when it wasn’t here, then it was, and now it’s not again, as if I’m a teen, early in her college years of the 1970s, moving toward an adult world where there were certain things in my future I’d be powerless against due to unfair laws, robbing me of personal decisions and freedom of choice, and then we at least finally had the relief of r v w; how on earth after nearly fifty years, could this happen, that the court decision could be reversed; never thought I’d be here to experience such a stunning, horrible development.

    • An estate sale happened in my neighborhood today. The last original homeowner/family besides me, of 50 houses; she has terminal disease which has affected physical and mental care of herself; has had to move to Florida to be near relatives; has been in her parents’ 1950s-era home since birth (she never married or lived anywhere else; was a teacher; her last parent died a dozen years ago, so she’s been there in the house alone ever since); I didn’t know her well but she’s near my age and only somewhat-recently retired; I feel so badly for her. Another neighbor very close to her, loves her so much, has been conscientiously caring for the vacant home, mowing the lawn, making it look like somebody lives there with timer lights, etc. He’s just heartsick over the whole thing and that he’ll never see her again; he’s younger and looked at this woman like a beloved grandma (although she wasn’t old enough to be his grandma!); was only about age 29 himself when they became neighbors, which goes back some 31 years when he was a newlywed.

      Apparently this illness-befallen neighbor of ours went for a family visit in Florida, got worse there healthwise and just couldn’t return which was never her intent (but her limited amount of family is there, no longer here; she needs their help); can you imagine that feeling in terms of loss of control of your life’s circumstances, having left your house never to return, with that never having been the plan? I’m glad that she’s not an ‘elder orphan’ and at least has a niece and great-nieces even though they’re clear across the whole United States in the southeast and we’re ‘way out here on the West Coast. What a challenge for that family. Gosh, I’ve really let this affect me. Can’t stop thinking about it. Although it’s not about ‘me’, it IS about the passage of time and I’ve let myself get saddened by it.

      So, what we can piece together is that a younger great-niece recently came from Florida, unfamiliar with the house and supposedly a first-and-only visit for her … a very BRIEF visit … never having actually remembered her Calif relatives/ancestors other than my neighbor, her great-aunt (who, over the years would visit Florida but not vice versa); surveyed the scene, at this home of her great-grandparents she never knew, probably took a few things back home in a suitcase or two (I’d assume stuff like photos; personal letters/papers and the like), hired a ‘garage sale/estate sale’ company to clean out the house after she left to return to Florida on this very-short trip (maybe she has a job; couldn’t linger; has a job and family to get back to, who knows); we’ve watched this go down with the estate-sale company for the past week or so; a rather-large team of busy workers, working feverishly and obviously on a deadline; huge piles of stuff waiting for the trash collector, then signs out all over the boulevards today, “Estate Sale, 9am to 1pm”. Experts at this sort of thing, I guess they do it a lot for families.

      It’s about to happen with another neighbor here, too, who went to assisted living offsite, taking just a few things, giving away a lot, although I understand the house is still half full with the adult children/grandchildren wanting nothing to do with it, so we’ll have a repeat performance of this kind of neighborhood goings-on right on the heels of what I saw today; another ‘estate-sale, auction group’ going in there and ridding a house of a 90-year-old woman’s accumulation of lifelong possessions and precious things. Kills me; just kills me.

      I know the money earned for this is to help my neighbor(s) with current predicament and future/ongoing expenses; of course the houses here in both cases will be sold for a mint; if the woman my age (the Florida situation) she still has full equity and we concerned neighbors feel she probably does, the house is worth at least $750,000 even if the interiors are dated (she just was starting some work and the exterior had been painted; looks so nice, great curb appeal; has a big yard with lawn front and back, completely fenced in with top-drawer brick) and her parents probably paid $14,000 for it as did my own folks. Just a ticky-tack, all-in-a-row tract house of 3bed/2 bath, mid-century ranch, not one thing fancy about it; these types of homes go like hotcakes here, even with the change in mortgage rates. That’s Southern Calif for you, when it comes to real estate. Newer houses have no yards since land is at such a premium here; sometimes the younger people want the old house just so they can have a yard for the kids.

      (My experience with these ‘estate sale/auction’ people, any of them, is that they know the good stuff, will buy it from the owner themselves since they get the first look, then later score big money online for themselves with resale on eBay and the like [it’s how I happenstance learned of an old matchbook for sale on eBay, which I normally don’t frequent {I got a tip on it from a local Facebook group which my husband checks in with from time to time} with my great-uncle’s dog on the b&w photo cover of the tiny matchbook {which probably dates from late 1930s ; bought it for a small fortune, but it was worth it to me!}]. My great-uncle & aunt’s shady Trustee did that same thing as what’s going on right now at my neighbor’s, had an auction company come in [in this case, banned the family from getting to any of the keepsakes; it was awful {a loss of so many private and cherished keepsakes }; I have too many tragic stories of this to tell; all I can say is, give it away in your lifetime because you have no control over what happens to the treasures after you’re gone].)

      I drove past this estate sale today, more than once while I was out in the car for something else (call me obsessed); throngs of people in tight spaces of the smallish house indoors and the dark hole of the garage; of course no one masked. I would have had to park a block away, I kid you not; too far for me to walk from my house in the hellish heatwave of the day when we were already 90 degrees at 10am. I really, really wanted to go because I’m one of those always looking for the perfect piece of vintage pyrex, the precious little ceramic collectible of a 1950s’ home decor (a house appearing to have been so little changed over such a long period of time, although I’m doing a lot of surmising); the same first-edition children’s book I might have read myself, back in the day. Or a vintage cookbook. Perhaps an old spice tin. Or a calendar from the 1960s. Embroidery work; samplers. Old kitchen jars repurposed for something else over the years (our Greatest-Generation parents did so much recycling; don’t throw away; ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’). I love the old high-end glass perfume bottles; quality costume jewelry from the 1940s; maybe an old sewing basket. I just like the old things! Ah, the thrill of that special find; I miss it! (I haven’t even been in the thrift stores since 2019.)

      I’m sure the house was stuffed to the gills after all this time, reflective of the aforesaid Greatest-Generation parents who were only age 30 when they bought their first and only home together, with a baby in their arms and one on the way, never having moved ever again. My own parents’ similar story here. ‘There but for you go I’; it could be me in this same scenario; strangers going through my things. Too many similarities. Feels invasive. So I kept saying to myself, “Our Covid numbers are surging; that’s not a safe environment for you with all those people in a cramped house and closed-in garage; essentially SRO and a nose-to-nose crowd. You don’t need anything. You don’t have the money to spend for anything extra; you don’t have the room in your house for one more thing. It seems disrespectful to the daughter your age who can’t clean out the house herself due to her health issues; it seems terribly intrusive to the life of a very-private family who were nothing but great neighbors for almost 70 years … just don’t, Vicki. Don’t.”

      So, I drove home, but I’m still bummed, trying to reconcile my conflicting emotions. In the scheme of what’s going on in the larger world, though, this is just the small stuff of life. I’ll get over it. My husband came in from out of town after an appointment and he said that although the estate sale is closed for the day now, til tomorrow which is the final day, there was still a good-sized amount of people at the house. I always have to say to myself, though, that people wouldn’t be there to buy things unless they’re collectors themselves and want the things, love the old things just like me, making a new life for them, better than indifferently cast aside. I think with me, this is complicated; about my childhood, trying to hang onto something slipping from my grasp, with the old neighborhood going through so much change; this woman’s house about to be sold and the other one two doors down from me to follow; change for me is getting harder and harder.

      Thanks for letting me spill. Don’t mean to take away from Don’s happy day. So glad you make the most of the happy times together. As they say in that Titanic movie which plays over and over and over again on the lower-‘dial’ TV channels, “Here’s to making it count!” The days fly, we make the most of them, love and happiness in all the moments, as much as we can squeeze in, our cups runneth over!

  28. Happy birthday to both birthday boys!
    At least something positive has happened on this day.
    It’s beyond belief – and you’re absolutely correct. Bought and paid for by an insane, evil wannabe dictator.

  29. Awwwww…..Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Little Z and Don, happy birthday to you!!! Enjoy your special day.

  30. Wow Don has a fan club
    Happy thoughts today for this amazing man
    I know I posted but when I looked at how many comments
    Amazing

  33. Please convey my Happy Birthday wishes to Don from the Badger State. Hope he’s having a wonderful day doing whatever he enjoys.

    Kay

  34. Happy Birthday Don and to little Z!!!!!!
    Very nice picture of you on your porch.

  36. Happy Birthday to the birthday boys!
    Don, that is a wonderful photo of you on the porch. I think it would make a great album cover!
    Take care,
    Lily

  37. Happy happy day to Don & to Liitle Z!! My hubs & I share June 24 w them as today is our 50th Wedding anniversary!! So, so sad that we have to share our day with this horrible news. Our daughter, daughter in law, & Granddaughter now have fewer rights than I had. It is tragic.

  38. Happy Birthday, Don! And of course Little Z!
    I hope it was a wonderful day for both of you.

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