More birthdays. Again with the birthdays! Saturday we celebrated my Grandma's 90th and today was a surprise party for my Great Aunt's 70th. So including my 33rd and Jack's 1st, that's 164 years of life celebrated since Tuesday. If they were lived successively rather than concurrently, our combined birthday would be in the same year Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message "What hath God wrought" from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore.
Friday night while out with friends, I mentioned how the rest of my weekend was booked with trips to the suburbs for these events and, I confess, I complained about all the driving that meant. One friend quickly replied "Still, it must be nice to have all that family here in town." Besides feeling appropriately guilty for whining, I realized she was correct.
Living most of your life in the same area where your immediate and (quite large) extended family resides can make you pretty complacent. It's easy to forget that in a city like Chicago, a good percentage of people hail from elsewhere and don't have the benefit of relatives just a short drive away.
The birthday girls recognized that blessing just fine. Well past the point of jokingly dreading birthdays, both my Grandma and Aunt mentioned several times how much they appreciated family members who took time from the weekend to celebrate their years.
Morse's first telegraph message back in 1844 was a Biblical quote from the Book of Numbers. To those with the most candles on their cake this weekend, numbers weren't much of a concern.
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