Birthday People
Happy birthday to my Grandma (yesterday), my brother (today) and my youngest nephew (today).
Grandma turns eighty-something today. She’s an absolutely amazing person, and I hope that I’m doing that well when I’m her age. She takes two ballet classes a week and does more volunteer work than I can keep track of. She also gets a lot of science-fiction pop culture references, which I think is exceptionally cool. One of my friends is very attached to her, and has said to me more than once that if he didn’t have one and a half perfectly good grandmothers of his own, he’d want mine. And it was his idea for me to take her to Venice. After my grandfather died in 1996, she figured that her travelling days were over. Nonsense, I said. Ari and I were taking her to Italy. None of us had ever been to Europe before–although Grandma had been to Alaska, gone whitewater rafting in Australia and trekked around the Galapagos, and Ari had lived in Mexico for a while.
We met up at LaGuardia airport and caught an Air France flight together. (I was amazed to discover that airline food can be good.) All of us were completely fragged by the time our plane landed at Marco Polo airport (Ari especially, as he’d had to fly from Oregon to New York before we even left the country). Despite this–and the fact that none of us spoke Italian–we managed to get through customs, onto the correct bus, and into Venice proper with minimal fuss. The fun part was trying to find our hotel. The map made it look like a shorter walk than it actually was, and we ended up on the wrong side of the Grand Canal, so we had plenty of time to gawk as we made our way to the nearest bridge. I was amazed by the architecture, and I assumed that Grandma was too, because she kept staring at the buildings. Finally, she leaned over to me and whispered “This place is a mess!” Before I could even think about it, I found myself saying “When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not.” And she got the joke.
That same day, we rode the vaporetto (water bus) all the way up and down the Grand Canal. (The gondolas were a little too touristy–and expensive.) Ari and I were sitting on the back, watching the sunset, which was stunning. Ari broke our comfortable silence and said “It’s really beautiful here, but I can’t wiat to get home and smell Portland.”
Much to my surprise, my youngest nephew has survived to his fourth birthday. There has been more than one occasion where I was surprised that his recklessness didn’t do him in…or that we’ve let him live this long. I was the one who gave him his nickname, Puddles, because as a baby, he was a world-champion drooler. In fact, he’s the only person to successfully drool down my dress. This is where my lack of interest in babies becomes a liability; Aunt Li had to learn the hard way that he should sit facing the room.
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