Golden Girl

​     Here's me on October 2, my birthday.

     I expect we've all had a memorable birthday or two along the way.
     For me there was, for example, my 20th birthday
​      Me, age 20, with a friend, Michel,

     On my 20th birthday I was a student in Paris and Mme. Vidalenc, the woman in whose house I was renting a room, threw me a birthday party with chocolate whipped cream cake which I ate it even though I don't much like chocolate cake or real whipped cream - I only like the fake stuff from the can or Cool Whip - and champagne which I drank even though I didn't drink and afterwards I threw up all night long.
         I also remember my 33nd birthday, the night before which I'd been up all most of the night with a  crying new-born, a sick 2 -year-old and a sick 4-year old, and thinking I felt more like 83 than 33.
​        Me, circa my 33rd birthday.

      On my  55th birthday I was on my way home from a visit with my daughter Claire who at that time was working in the Nicaraguan jungle.
      Me on a bus - well, actually, it was a truck - in the city of Leon a few days before my 55th birthday.

     I remember on the evening of that birthday floating in the pool of the Best Western hotel in Managua, looking up at the moon and thinking, Wow, here I am floating in a pool in Managua on my birthday looking up at the moon.
     On my 62nd and 64th birthdays I was in Spain with Tom hiking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

Circa birthdays no. 62,

​...and  64.

      Though off the top of my head I don’t remember either of those days in particular, I guess I could always look them up -  as could anyone who wished -  on my Camino blogs, “Tighten Your Boots” and “…And Lighten Your Pack”.
      And I expect this past birthday should also go into my basket of memorable birthdays, maybe not so much for what I did on that day as for the fact that the day marked the 65th rotation of the earth around the sun since my arrival on the planet, officially signifying in my society and culture my  entrance into a new phase of life as well as bringing some changes in my legal and social status.
       However I did in fact end up spending my 65th birthday involved in something memorable:  on that day I was, in a small way, part of the 2016 Presidential campaign.

I spent the day canvassing for Hillary Clinton.