Birthday greetings: Slothful Salsa, the Penguins of Penzance, and zuiki.
“Slothful Salsa”: the title of a Jacquie Lawson animated ecard, from R&T (Rod Williams and Ted Bush), celebrating my birthday with a delightful salsa-style performance of “Happy Birthday” by a band of jungle animals under the direction of a drummer sloth. At the conclusion, going from the snake on bass to the leopard on guitar:
(#1) All together now! — a slothful salsa led by a salsic sloth; not many sloths are into salsa music, though there are reports of sloths enamored of the spicy sauce, which they consume with ponderous dignity, giving out little whimpers of pleasure (sloths don’t move fast, but they’re very earnest)
From NOAD:
noun salsa: 1 [a] a type of Latin American dance music incorporating elements of jazz and rock. [b] a dance performed to salsa music. 2 (especially in Latin American cooking) a spicy tomato sauce: a flour tortilla with salsa and shredded cheese. ORIGIN Spanish, literally ‘sauce’, extended in American Spanish to denote the dance.
“The Penguins of Penzance”: this wonderful artwork by Opal Armstrong Zwicky, made specifically as a birthday present for me:
(#2) G&S, The Pirates of Penzance — complete, presumably, with the leap birthday and the pilot / pirate confusion — but done with penguins (my original totem animal)
Opal was introduced to Pirates as a child, by her mother and me, and it took. So in addition to the familial Savoyardism, Opal is also an accomplished artist, with a wry sense of humor, and appreciates my attachment to penguins.
Buddhist deep joy. Finally, from Larry Schourup (a loving friend of 55 years now, living for many years in Japan), an e-mail with a birthday sentiment that just bowled me over:
The other day, while listening to a talk in Japanese, an unfamiliar Buddhist term caught my ear. Afterward, when I looked it up, I realized I’d found the perfect way to express how I feel about your momentous 85th. The term, which means “a feeling of deep joy and gratitude for another person’s virtues” is zuiki.
Zuiki is (one version of) my name in Chinese. So for a moment I thought Larry had fabricated the whole wonderful business. But no, it’s all just as he said, and it’s deeply moving.
Bonus. All done in public, on Facebook. Starting with an astonishing encomium from my step-son Kit Transue (my man Jacques Transue’s son), to friends on FB:
— KT: Happy birthday, Arnold Zwicky! (Arnold is one of my two step-dads: he was my father’s partner through my father’s brain cancer, treatment, and subsequent early onset Alzheimer’s. Throughout the course of those challenges, he remained a source of unlimited love and gave my father unimaginable company and support.) Thank you for being true, for being loving, for being open, and for being loud*!
(*I’m no longer surprised by friends who know Arnold from his USENET posts; he now blogs [on WordPress here])
— AZ > KT: Wow. No, I’m not going to dispute that amazing encomium, beyond saying that in all those matters I’ve been doing what I thought I needed to do (not placing any burden on anyone else, also reminding people that I’m a real person, someone who makes mistakes, is often negligent, and sometimes screws things up badly). But yes, I did those good things. I’d just like to emphasize that there was a wonderful time before the first disastrous time, and a long deeply satisfying time with Jacques in between the two disastrous times. I’ve written a fair amount about J’s view of himself as my support staff and my protector (as well as my best friend and my lover and a second son for my dad) and about the pleasures and challenges of life together. He was a good man, the love of my life, still poignantly missed. It’s especially moving that you praise me in just the way your father did; being open (and highly visible) and being loud were not his ways, but he applauded my performances and the good that might come of them.
Life stories. Nothing really could follow the birthday wishes from Larry and Kit. But I also got birthday e-mail from X, who noted that we’d been friends for 51 years. (Larry goes back to Columbus OH, 55 years ago; Benita Bendon Campbell — a friend from Princeton, 66 years ago — survives, with her considerable wits intact; but surely the time-depth award for Surviving Friends of Arnold goes to Bill Richardson, whose friendship goes back to summer boys’ camp when we were but 10, fully 75 years ago.) I cast my mind back to the occasion when X and I met, what their previous life and mine had been like, and how our two lives, separately, then followed extraordinarily complex, and frankly unlikely, paths. And wrote them:
Would anyone believe your life story? Or mine? Bits of it, sure, but the whole thing, in sequence, I doubt it.
X then helpfully pulled out some of the more extraordinary recent turns in their life, which I agreed no one could have predicted, or maybe even imagined possible.
