A short Sunday

A short Sunday is what you get when you sleep until 11:30 a.m.

Part of my short Sunday included grocery shopping at my tiny neighborhood Giant Eagle, which, if I don't exactly love, I favor, because it is familiar and has only two self-checkout lines. The rest have people at the cash registers

I know the cashiers and the baggers by face, if not by name, meaning I know which ones I prefer and which ones to avoid. Today I learned the face of a new bagger to avoid; he tossed items in my bags willy nilly, with me repacking almost as soon as he plopped a bag in my cart. But most of the people there are nice, they seem all to have worked there for a long time, although I haven't seen the Sikh cashier checking anyone out lately.

In September 2008, my friends Carol, Virginia, Ellen and I took a girlfriends trip to Paris. One of the nicest experiences of the trip was buying our dinner the first night at a street market near the apartment we had rented in St. Germain des Pres. We bought a whole roasted chicken, some fabulous roasted potatoes, green beans and a baguette.

It was so much fun choosing our food and having it packed right in front of us.

I'll always remember from having lived in France when I was a kid seeing moms head home in the evenings with string bags full of provisions for the evening meal and the ever-present baguette. My mom once took us to Les Halles, now demolished, and, because I was little, I remember being awed by things like skinned pig heads in the meat cases. As a grownup, I am certain I would have appreciated the atmosphere more. In Pittsburgh, the Strip District comes close, but for my money, Cleveland's West Side Market is the place to shop on Saturday mornings.

Happy Birthday

This has to go into the books as an unremarkable birthday, except that I slept too late. There might be a bit of symmetry there if I could remember my mother ever telling me that I arrived in this world early, late or just about on time. Perhaps a remarkable aspect of me is that I can be all three. I am never perpetually late, early or just about on time.

I prefer to mix things up; it's the Aquarian in me.

Back to the birthday. It could not even be called remarkable in that it was defined by 2 and 3 feet high drifts of snow outside, because, after, all it is February in a northern climate even though such heavy falls are less common now then when I was younger.

What could be remarkable is that, except for shoveling snow, I take the dreary weather of my birth month with much more equanimity now that I am older, or as singer-songwriter-actor Loudon Wainwright III (63) told Terri Gross in an interview on "Fresh Air" this afternoon, "closer to the end."

I'm not a particular fan of LWJ, but I enjoyed the interview because Terri Gross asks good questions; for example wondering what it was like for him to revisit songs he had written as a young and very different man, singing with a much younger voice. I don't recall the answer; I just was struck by the empathy the question evoked in me, because I feel like such a completely different person from young Katy. The journey hasn't always been easy, but it has been interesting. I've learned a lot that has helped me to be, I hope, a better person.

There are 50 minutes left in my birthday. Snow is falling and time is passing, softening all hard edges.