Gloria Ferris

So here we are smack dab in the middle of “the dog days of summer“  and nine days away from my birthday.  I never liked my birthday because it came during the summer, and therefore, I never got to take a treat to school so my mother wise woman that she was figured out that my HALF birthday was February 9 and so, if one of my classmates did not have a birthday on February 9 I would take a treat to school for my half birthday.  My mother always told me that it would not be a friendly thing to do to take a treat if it truly was someone’s birth day.  Usually there wasn’t anybody with a birthday and I took the treat to school.  My treat of choice was devil’s food chocolate cupcakes with sea foam icing and red cinnamon hearts on top.    

But back to my actual birthdays when I was just a kid.  If it was a weekend, my dad would cook breakfast and then, he and I would take off to town where we would tend to our weekly errands but I made sure that every shopowner knew that it was my birthday.  I always came home with my pockets full of lollipops, bubblegum, shiny new quarters, and even a dollar or two.  My mom would scold my dad for letting me take all of those things, and he would just say “Oh Ginny her birthday is only once a year”. 

 And then, we would sit down to dinner which I had chosen the week beforehand.  My mom always let my dad and I choose what we wanted to eat for our birthdays, and strangely enough, Dad and I never returned the favor.  When I grew older and no longer lived at home, I returned the favor, but when I was growing up I just never thought of it.  I don’t know why my mother bothered to ask me because it was always the same menu–hamburgers on the grill, fresh tomatoes, and corn on the cob and a Red Velvet cake for dessert.  

After dinner just as the summer heat dissipated my dad would ask me if I was ready to go fishing, and I was always ready to go fishing but especially on my birthday.  Now, my mother hated the water and never went fishing with Dad and me except on my birthday.  You couldn’t get her to step in a boat any other day of the year, but we had started this tradition when I was quite small and she hated to disappoint.  So off we went!  I on the other hand loved the water, and couldn’t wait to sit quietly in our favorite fishing spot watching the sun go down, and listening to the night sounds of the lake.

Dad always insisted that when the sky was fully dark that we dock the boat and sit on a blanket on land.  I always whined, but he would say “Enough, Cat!” and I knew better than to continue.  He knew that my mother just couldn’t take the darkness on the water.  We would watch the stars begin to pop out as the sky darkened and as it got darker the magic would begin.  shooting stars would begin falling all over the sky.  Too many to count let alone wish upon.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out that this nighttime spectacle wasn’t just for me but it was the Perseids Meteor Shower and that it would occur at the same time each year in the summer sky with or without my birthday.  My parents were very special people, and I miss them all the time, but especially on my birthday.

Don’t you just wish some days that you were ten again? 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.