65 Years Old

It's true. I had my birthday on Saturday. I'm now a card carrying member of the medicare system. I've always been a little smug about having my birthday exactly in the middle of summer. Some people have their birthdays in such ugly months. Actually, July can be pretty ugly too. This year the weatherman said that the temperature could have hit 100 degrees on the 15th. It didn't, but it was hot all week. We started celebrating on Wednesday already. We went to the Main St. Bar and Grill in Warroad for supper and then went shopping for a present for me. We found a stained glass dragonfly atop a metal rod for me to put beside a rose bush that's new to the garden this year. We also bought me a cream-colored fairy who is holding a white glass ball that glows in the garden after dark. Last summer, on another hot day, we had gone to an auction. I had seen a white stone angel for the garden that I liked. We waited quite awhile for it to come up for bidding. It was a thirsty wait, so we finally went to the Williams Bar and Grill for a little relief. When we got back to the auction, the angel was gone. My new birthday garden fairy can pass for an angel if you don't look at her little pointy toed boots. We were very disappointed in her for a few days though and thought we would have to return her. Though she sat in the sun all day, her ball didn't glow at night. Fortunately, by the time my birthday rolled around, my husband had figured out that she has a little switch hidden away that you must turn on. On the Friday before my birthday we took a long ride through the state forest south of us. We thought that Bear and Sadie could go for a swim in a gravel pit we knew was there. We have had little rain this summer and our pond has totally dried up. It's a very shallow gravel pit. The sun was beating down and the water was warm. Sadie waded gingerly out and retrieved a few sticks my husband had thrown out for her, but Bear was worried about the fact that I was standing in the shade near the car. We had taken her and Sadie to a kennel and driven off and left them there for a few days earlier this month. I think she was concerned that I was hanging back because I was planning to drive off and abandon them all in the wilderness. When I left the shade and joined them at the edge of the water, she nervously swam out for a few sticks, but her heart wasn't in it. We had planned to stop You-Know-Where when we popped out of the woods at Williams to have a shrimp basket. But it occured to us that Sadie and Bear couldn't wait for us in the car in the heat. So we took them home and then had the shrimp basket at the Nitehawk in downtown Roosevelt instead. Finally, after all the preliminary activities, my birthday dawned, bright and blistering hot. I started by opening the presents from my sister. My sister is known for her big generous boxes of gifts. She had sent me two denim dresses, a basket of books with a little can of book darts to mark the pages, a cream colored tea kettle with apples on it, a little electric hot plate to keep a cup of tea nice and hot, a set of colored carpenter pencils, some knee pads for kneeling in the garden, and a stained glass angel sun catcher. Then I read in my night gown in front of the fan for quite awhile. On my birthday and ONLY on my birthday, I am allowed two Hershey bars, instead of only one. So I had one right away with my first cup of tea. What do you do on Friday nights when you live in Wisconsin? You go out for a fish fry, of course. Once, when we were sitting on a stool You-Know-Where, we mentioned the Wisconsin fish fries to a Minnesota friend. He told us about a really good Minnesota fish fry at a resort on the Rainy River. One Sunday afternoon last summer we set out to find that resort. We couldn't remember its name, but we both thought it had the word'river' in it. We stopped at the River View Resort for a sandwich. The waitress told us that no, they didn't have a famous fish fry. It was the River Bend Resort. So we journeyed on down the road and sure enough, at a big bend in the river.... On my birthday evening (a Saturday night instead of the Wisconsin Friday night preference) we returned to the River Bend for the famous fish fry. What makes it famous and maybe more expensive than your average Wisconsin fish fry are the big tasty walleye pike filets. Like an ordinary fish fry it has cole slaw, baked beans and a roll. But it also has a baked potato, fried onions and thick sliced bacon. The fish are being breaded and fried and the stainless steel containers of everything else are being replenished outdoors. Picnic tables are stretched out all along River Bend's share of the shore. As you sit and eat, you look out across the river at our good neighbor, Canada. They have no resorts on their shore, just lovely Up North fir trees. A gentle breeze always seems to be stirring and you often see someone you know. As you probably know, it is rude, crude and politically incorrect to attempt to take home food from an all you can eat fish fry. What if everybody did that? The problem was, we had Bear and Sadie waiting at home and we had promised them a birthday treat. I didn't feel too bad about it. With our senior citizen appetites we hadn't piled our plates nearly as high as the young people around us. So it was that my husband went back for a second plate. We each surreptitiously snuck one filet, one piece of bacon and a spoonful of beans into our empty paper cups. We tried not to look around and see if anyone was watching and we hoped that the nice young lady whose duty it was to see that everyone had plenty to drink didn't show up to peek into our cups. Then we casually left with our cups and had a pleasant drive home to the waiting pups. And that, my patient reader, is the history of my 65th birthday. May I have many, many more.