I was just discharged from the hospital for the second time in 3 weeks on my birthday. I hadn’t been expecting to be in the hospital again at all, though I guess one might suggest I had a hint the previous Monday when I had to go to the ER with a rather nasty UTI. I was given an antibiotic to counter it, given a few days off to recover and tried to go back to work and succeeded only for a couple of days.

Come the weekend, I was having trouble again, so I went to my local ER on Sunday after work. They diagnosed me with a more aggressive UTI from the one I had been afflicted with and determined that I needed another hospital stay, but couldn’t find me a bed locally. In the end I had to be shipped out of state, and spent the next 3 days being ‘patched up’, drowned in IV fluids and antibiotics to counter the more complex infection. Wednesday was my 59th birthday, and so I spent the time mostly in hospital, and not celebrating at home. But, it reminded me of birthdays past, when I was elsewhere, doing happier things.

The first picture, judging by the number of candles on the cake, is of my fourth birthday. The elderly couple in the front are my paternal grandparents. The location is my childhood home in the Hudson Valley, where we had a few acres of land and a really spectacular view of the Catskill Mts. I lament that I don’t have any pictures of that and wonder why I or my parents never bothered to take any. It’s entirely possible that we just took the view for granted and never thought it would be necessary to document it, though I can see it pretty well in my mind’s eye at any given moment. The second photo is of a birthday get-together that occurred at my paternal Aunt & Uncle’s compound in Sullivan County, near the Borscht Belt enclaves. The gentleman in the back is my Uncle once removed (generational terminology has always been my kryptonite) Preston, though everyone called him Prett. He was a doer to his dying breath, I loved that about him and his brother Francis. They instilled in me a love of earth moving equipment, and always to have something on the burner to do. They just had oodles of energy as well.

Having a birthday around a National Holiday can be difficult, but especially so when you’re younger. Compound that by having it in the summertime, and you have a recipe for disaster. After a couple of years of trying to get together school friends to come to a party in early July; my parents hit on the idea of celebrating in Sullivan County. Coincidentally, my paternal Grandmother’s birthday was July 4, so we would pack up early on the 4th, drive to their house in Ulster County, and then head over the Shawangunk Mountains to Sullivan. There would be other kids my brother’s and my age (cousins and the neighborhood kids) and lots to do on 100 acres of property. Uncle Francis & Prett would always have something going in their excavating business, and with 5 bulldozers of varying sizes in their possession, I was in hog heaven. We’d get piled into the big white pickup and driven to wherever they were working that month and get a ride on a bulldozer. Or go tramping into the woods to see whatever new project they were tinkering with. One year they build a water wheel out of wood, and were experimenting with generating their own electricity. Honestly, it was always something.

The older I get, the more I remember the past fondly. Just thought I’d share another memory of a July one more year removed. Hope you enjoyed it. I did.