Happy birthday to me.

Today I'm 45. Strange, it isn't a number with which I feel at all connected. That's someone else's number. It isn't that I mind aging - it is surely better than the alternative - but looking back, it really hits me that time goes so fast. It may have been a lifetime ago in some ways, but at other times it seems as if only yesterday I was a kid, riding my bicycle to the general store, or a 20-year-old, chatting with my grandmother about what it was like to be in her 70s. If time continues to breeze by (and by all indications, my perception is that it seems to go faster with aging), in no time at all I will be a senior citizen. Now how can that be?

Bob has a class tonight, so we celebrated on Friday, by having dinner at Villa Valenti, a cozy restaurant that I love, with a great salad bar and homemade pasta. Then yesterday my mother cooked dinner, and made a cake for me. She sent me home with a pan of stuffed shells for tonight, since I am on my own. "Sweet." There! Does that make me young? Or maybe dated?

Later today, over at GPB, I hope to find the time to post my tribute to Rudy (first I have to do a bit of work on my classes), since yesterday he would have been 11, and on September 25, he will be gone for one year already. Yes, time flies, but it has been a long year without him to brighten my days.