I Made it to my 86th !!

Happy birthday to me!

Happy birthday to me!

Happy birthday lucky me-ee

Happy birthday tooo meee!

I was born in a hospital in Norwalk Conn. 86 years ago today. When I was 4 years old, a doctor decided I must have my tonsils out. As Mother took me to the pediatric ward in the hospital she told me I had been born in that hospital. We were passing a crib parked in the hallway at the time, and I remember asking her if I had been born in that bed. She laughed and told me probably not. I thought it was a cute little crib, and I was disappointed.

I come from a line of long livers on my mother's side. Mother lived to be 90 years old and was still a very pretty woman when she died in 1990. She wore stylish dresses, many with lavender touches, and had her white hair set weekly and always had a blue rinse - I think it was called French Blue. When I took her out to eat, old gentlemen would smile at her and give her compliments - flirting with her in her eighties! She loved it!

Not me, I never took care of myself as she did. So here I am a wrinkled old crone with a shock of non-blue-tinted white hair that I usually cut myself, looking for the right kind of broom to take a ride on Halloween. I can scare kids without a mask! But I have been luckier than she was in having strong bones. Nothing is broken yet. She had to spend her last years in a nursing home getting around in a wheel chair because a broken hip and leg.

Mother used tell a story of visiting a 96 year old great-aunt in Lanesboro, a little town near Gloucester Mass. Mother and her husband knocked on the front door with no response. As they walked around the house, they saw Aunt Alice wiping her hands on her apron as she came to greet them. She said, "You'll have to forgive me. I've been out choppin' wood." She had been an unmarried schoolteacher for about 60 years.

Mother and I were both widows of two marriages. She married a farmer, my father, who died of alcoholism at only 49 years old. She did better with her second husband, Nathan, a former playmate back in Sherborn Massachusetts when they were toddlers. He became a successful structural engineer, a very nice person and a loving husband. He made her happy. Now they are lying side by side in the Flagg family plot at Pine Hill Cemetery in Sherborn.

World War II broke out in Europe in 1939 when I was 17. I remember I was with my family vacationing at York Beach Maine at the time where, just offshore, the Navy was trying to rescue trapped sailors in the sunken submarine Squalus. They succeeded.

After Pearl Harbor as soon as I was 20, I joined the Navy, and a year or so later I married a sailor who was my crew chief. Because we had liberty together and nothing else to do we went to the manse of a Presbyterian Church and an old pastor married us on the spot. We had no friends with us and ithe minister's wife and son signed as witnesses. It lasted 34 years and three children later until he died of a heart attack in 1977.

Within the year I married a tall Scotsman at a marriage mill in Yuma AZ. The ceremony was conducted by a little man in a red jacket with brass buttons. Scotty made me burst out laughing when he whispered, 'Captain Kangaroo".  Again I got married without any friends or family around, and the witnesses were two women from the office.

Come to think of it, I must have something against social ceremonies. I've never even had a birthday party. I have never liked parties much. Even as a kid Mother had to make me go to parties.

Scotty was a member of the British Commandos for a few years early in the war. Mainly he served in the Queen's Own Highland Regiment the Black Watch for (as he used to say) a total of 34 years, 27 months and 9 days in service. After fighting Rommel in the African desert and slogging through the mud in Italy, he was stationed in Israel and later in Africa fighting the Mau-mau before being sent to India. That's where he was when the war in Korea broke out. He was made a Regimental Sergeant Major in the field not long before being captured. He barely lived to tell the tale. He died of cardiac infarction four days after the millenium, Jan. 4^th, 2000. We had been married 22 years. His first wife and baby were killed in the Blitz in London while he was in the commandos.

So that's what I'm thinking of on this crisp, sunny day here in this horse camp in the mountains east of San Diego. I don't know what in store today, but I think my daughter Jane has made me a birthday cake. I'm going to stop by when I get the mail about noon. Maybe we will go up to the Golden Acorn Casino for a meal.

Right now I'm going to make some biscuits to eat with butter and honey as I catch up on the news.