It was my birthday recently. I am now fifty one. I was worried that I would feel sad on this birthday. My last birthday was such a magical celebration in all ways.We traveled with my best friends to New York. It went on and on for the entire month of August actually, until I finally had to plead my friends and family to stop. It was perfect.

This year we had just returned from our annual week in the the Sierras and we had no plans. This always worries me a little, I say I don’t want to do anything for my birthday and then the day comes around and I feel forgotten and unnoticed. I struggle with the perpetration of this celebration tradition, yet I look forward to the queen-for-a-day status like a raving maniac. This year we got home and when I checked my messages there were so few. I grumbled and whined a bit but then I was brave and persuaded myself that jam making was a great thing to do on one’s 51st birthday.

The day before my birthday. I went to the farmer’s market for the jam fruit and luckily ran into lots of folks and received loads of phone calls. It seemed that everyone got back into town.My spirits were rising. My band assembled at my house at 11:00 am. We ended up playing music until 5:00 pm and then we were invited to a ping pong tournament and I stayed there at that lovely house in the Santa Cruz Mountains summer night drinking delicious homemade pinot noir until midnight.

The morning of my birthday my family showered me with gifts. My mom gave me an ottoman shaped like a turtle. I don’t remember having animal shaped furniture in our house when I was growing up. What about me screams “I must have that leather turtle shaped ottoman?” It worries me a bit. I must admit that is wonderfully comfortable and Mark is using it everyday when he reads the paper and drinks his coffee. I took the turtle head off so that I wouldn’t trip over it. It now looks like a turtle hiding his head. The tail is to remain. Mark and A gave me a fabulous ring made by my dear friend Ann Wasserman and Stand Up Paddle Board lessons.

I made the jam and then zipped off to the a bridal shower of an old friend. I had a great group of women friends in the early nineties. We had been thrown together by the commonality of our sons. They all went to the same preschool. When my son died they were there and were the strong shoulders that I needed. After our daughter was born we divided. Not because they were not happy for me, but nine year old boys and newborn girls have little in common. We stayed loosely in touch, but stopped sharing celebrations and vacations together. My son would have turned twenty two this year. It is always hard to pass these milestones. What would he be doing? Graduating from college? It is hard to write of him. He is the fabric of my life.

These women, these lovely women brought me back in. We picked up as if we had never left off. Our lives have taken many turns and twists that we could not have anticipated. We have navigated through them and then on my fifty first birthday thirteen years later we were together again, older, the same, different, calmer, and reflective.

That same evening another arm of my old friends had us up to dinner in their quaint mountain home. We sat on the porch, cold and happy, drinking sparkling wines. Later we played guitars until our teenagers begged us to stop so that they could go to bed.

At 2:00 pm I fell into bed feeling excited to be fifty-one. Only nine more years until my 60th. I can start planning that celebration.

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We had the best time in New England this summer. Truly Mark and I were on a second honeymoon. Although we never had a first one, we have traveled so much we hadn’t missed it. Nonetheless, it was marvelous. Boston was a blast. We held back at nothing, we walked, road bikes, saw theater, went to movies, museums, ate great food, and went to a Red Socks game. The Red Socks were playing the Oakland A’s so we cheered loudly for the wrong team, but avoided a fight. We walked back to our hotel that night under the glow of the Citgo sign having had a great time. All the way around it was fun.

We dropped our daughter off at camp in Maine and both of us were quiet for two days. It was hard to think of vacationing without her. Maine lovingly embraced our tender hearts. The weather was lovely: warm, rainy, sunny. The hiking was magical and invigorating. Rockafeller in the 1920’s, being one of the “Rusticators”, built fifty miles of carriage roads through Mount Desert Island. These roads are still maintained today and are used for cycling and hiking. They meander over cobblestone bridges, around lakes and through forests. We loved the ease and beauty of these carriage roads wishing that we had something similar in Santa Cruz county, maybe along the rail lines.

The food in Maine was fabulous, lobster is hard to do wrong. Portland Maine boasts having the most restaurants per capita next to something like Manhattan. It also boasts two James Beard award winning restaurants. We ate well in Portland belgian fries and gruyere and duck confit panini sandwiches. The diners we met were friendly and proud of their award winning city. We got some great ideas for our little cafe.

Mark had booked charming yet funky cabins with wonderful views. Once I got past the smell of long winters and disinfectant I grew to love these charming “cottages”. We were successful in avoiding overly friendly innkeepers, a fear that I had in going to Maine and staying in inns.

But most of all, the time that Mark and I spent together, discovering, laughing, admiring, adjusting, (as one has to do in travel) was perfect. We had trauma with a torn retina in my eye, but we luckily moved through that okay.

On the last day of our travels before picking up our daughter, we stopped at a Dunkin Donuts. These are hard to avoid in Maine, they seem to be about every ten feet on the highway. It was dumping rain and we stopped to use the facilities and grab a cup of coffee, a habit that insures more Dunkin Donuts stops. We sat in the offensive orange and pink interior and laughed at how much we liked the weak coffee. At that moment I remembered a day in my high school years. I had driven down to the beach early on a foggy summer morning with a friend for her birthday. We went to a breakfast cafe, had the usual fare, and laughed in our teenage girl way. At that Dunkin Donuts in Maine I was reminded of this morning so many years past. I remembered dreaming of a rainy day, cozy, inside a place like this. A day I would sit with a man that I loved and feel the same intense friendship and relaxed humor that I had with my friend. I have shared countless meals and experiences with Mark and others, some memorable and some not. It was curious that the memory bubbled up so fiercely that morning.

I have had this amazing love/friendship with Mark for twenty five years now. As with any life it has been sprinkled with intense joys and sorrows. At that moment I realized that I have been living my dream of so many breakfasts past. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would connect that memory with my present in a Dunkin Donuts in Maine.

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