When I was a kid, the family tradition was that the big parties with lots of kids and presents and cake and laser tag and video games stopped when you were 11 or 12, and after that everyone in the family got the same thing: dinner and a movie – a grown-up birthday.
This year, I think I had an especially grown-up birthday.
We slept in, then debated whether to ride to the east side for breakfast or walk to a closer place. We opted for biking. We chose the route that goes behind Camp Randall Stadium, UW’s football arena, that is named after an actual Civil War camp, and under the stone “Camp Randall” arch that is one of the last 19th century remnants (there’s a canon and wooden hut, too). As we rode under the arch to stop at a traffic light, one of the brake cables on Mark’s bike snapped. No matter, it’s his clunker bike that has coaster brakes, too, so we pushed on. But then, a few blocks further, with a great hissing noise, I got a flat. Happily we were just a short way to walk our bikes to the repair place, and then just a little further to go – back into the shadows of he stadium – to get to Micky’s Dairy Bar. So we dropped our bikes and went and ate.
We went about the rest of our day, and got our bikes back later in the afternoon.
For dinner we went out to the summer camp where Mark’s son is working, and ate quesadilla’s from Pasqual’s and watched the kids perform. Camp Shalom is a day camp with three 3-week sessions every summer, and on the Wednesday of the last week, the kids invite the parents out for dinner, and see the show, then the older kids sleep over, have a short day Thursday, and no camp Friday. My first foster daughter, Kaylah, and her girlfriend Kendra, are also counselors there this summer. Kendra’s b-day is a few days after mine, so I got lots of birthday hugs. we cane home and ate peach-blueberry cobbler that I had made the night before – it was just as good as it had been warm. It was a Thomas Keller recipe – I just used peaches and blueberries instead of all berries.
The real birthday dinner came Friday night, when we drove down to Milwaukee to Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro to have dinner with John & Megan, and see their new apartment and kitties. Oh, and Mark got me a cookbook I already had – but John got me one that I didn’t.
