Today is my mother's birthday. You haven't heard a lot about my mother yet, but it's coming. My mother is a quiet steady engine that keeps this family well fed and motoring right along. She always turns out great meals except on her birthday which has become synonymous with going out for Chinese. When my mother cooks, she usually has a stick or two of butter at the ready. One of our family's favorite recipes is Greek chicken- like Yiya used to make. My non Greek mother is not particularly fond of this dish, but she patiently churns it out by request. As the saying goes in my family- first you take a chicken... then you bake it in a pan with tomato sauce; cook the macaroni, drain the noodles and add a stick of butter. Then you pour all that chicken dripping tomato sauce on top of those buttery noodles and.... I can't even stand to write about it, it's that good. Another specialty is fudge cake, not to mention Aunt Mary's Hot fudge sauce, and chocolate muffins, but don't get me started.
My mother was born here at the old Sibley Hospital which was on North Capitol Street. She weighed seven pounds, and was the first child born in the family. Her parents, Bernice and Roger Calvert had just gotten married the year before on Bernice's eighteenth birthday. They named my mother after her mother, Bernice Bailey, and so she became "BB" which morphed into the Bebe we know today. My grandmother wrote: "Baby's first ride was from the hospital in Dr. Molzahi's car. After that she had numbers of auto rides, street car rides, baby carriage rides, but I think she loves best of all to ride in daddy's arms."
Too sweet.
She was born a blond, and to this day, through the miracle of modern means, she has stayed a blonde. She is so beautiful that she became a model AFTER she raised three children and before she had one more. She is still a looker and still on the go, planning the next cruise as soon as this one is over. She even drags herself to exercise class and does Thanksgiving for forty of our closest relatives- all on my Dad's side. (That includes a turkey AND a ham and about 5,000 pounds of mashed potatoes)
So this is it- the one day a year she doesn't have to cook. I have to go round up the kids. We're off for Chinese somewhere in Rockville.
So Happy Birthday, MOM, and thanks.
The writer Henry Miller, who made his home in Big Sur, California, had this to say about light: "There are two magic hours of the day which I have only really come to know and wait for, bathe in, I might say, since living here. One is dawn, the other sunset. In both we have what I like to think of as 'the true light': the one cold, the other warm, but both creating an ambiance of super-reality, or the reality behind reality....Everything is brush and cones, umbrellas of light-the leaves, bought, stalks, trunks standing out separate and defined, as if etched by the Creator himself."
Cool place for da bags, eh? 
And cool new park we've discovered!
How we do da swimmin' thing. I pick up the kong-on-a-rope and toss it to mom or dad or anyone who looks like they cans throw it good!
Temps are in the 70s and ground is slightly mucky, which is just perfecto fer me!
Okay ready!
Hey, c'mon! I'm ready!
Geez whiz, thought you'd never frow it!
Whoopee! After the Kong I go!
And then... return it!
Hmmmmnnnn... seems like there's a welcoming party...
But I can make my way through 'em all!
And RUN... to my dad... who will throw it again and again... I hope!
No way! Tomorrow? Uh uh... no way.
