Congratulations and happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday, and congratulations on having such a great attitude!
I have two long-time friends who are Christmas Eve babies who have wasted too much time lamenting the fact that their birthdays have to compete with Christmas. Life is what you make it. Cheers!
A very joyous birthday to you!
Happy Birthday @Crane !
What a lovely post. I, too, would love to read about your life and the lives of those who came before you. I’m happy to know that you have mobility, family, and the thoughtfulness required to keep a family tradition of recording your history. What a lovely gift to future generations. Many more years of happiness to you.
I will be 56 in two weeks. I love and have always loved to hear stories from times before I lived, particularly from people who lived them. When I was in my teens and 20s, people thought it was sweet and charming how I listened to people talk about seeing the movie 42nd Street in the theater when the story was fresh. Or even listening to someone talk about the end of WWI. Or to a woman talk about her experience being evacuated from London to an American family during WWII.
Not so much now. I do meet very old people with stories who want to talk, but they are not as impressed by a curious 56-yr-old.
So I get a little what you are saying.
I also want to say, I would love to read you reminiscences. And you would be surprised what becomes important: a woman in a Jewish shtetl in Germany named Glukl wrote a family history, just for her children, back in the late middle ages, in Yiddish, but somehow, a copy survived, and has been translated into several languages, including English, and you can read it now.
So your book could be famous some day. Keep writing, and don’t try to make it spectacular. Make it ordinary. That is what will be fascinating to people 100 years from now.
a wonderful post, Crane, Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday !
I add my greetings to all the others: Happy Birthday @Crane !
I also commend you for your work in preserving family history. When my father died, I was compelled to create my own family tree on ancestry.com.
In the beginning of that tree construction, I would find myself wondering about the holes in the information. And I’d think, “Oh, I need to ask Daddy…”
I have an online Journal that I want to post to again. There are family stories that I want to leave to my kids and my grandkids. Everyone is busy with their own lives, their own worries, their own stresses, and they don’t seem able to sit still long enough to listen to the stories right now. Or they are on their damnable phones!
But one day, they may be curious as to who they are, what people they came from. And I want my stories to pull them into the family history, and maybe relive moments from another time, another place.
Again, Happy Birthday, and well wishes from the youngster who just turned 70 a couple of weeks ago.
~VOW
You are all very generous. That is the most birthday cards I ever received.
OK, but I’ll keep it short - don’t want wear out my welcome.
By the time I arrived, Dad’s shore duty was nearly over. In March of 1933 he boarded the Lexington with VP-3 and sailed to Coco Solo, Panama.
1933 Coco Solo Panama
VP-3 Coco Solo Panama
In September 1933 mother and I followed Dad to Panama. We sailed on the German Hamburg-Amerika liner “Tacoma”. To greet us in Panama, my father spent a day on the train from Coco Solo to Balboa and stayed overnight at the YMCA. He got up very early in the morning and went out to the ship on the pilot boat. The captain welcomed him aboard and we all went through the locks of the canal together. At Coco Solo I could not leave the ship because I had not been vaccinated. So, I was vaccinated on board by the ships’ doctor. He made 4 large incisions at the points of a cross. When my mother was furious, the doctor said “Dots da vey vee do it in chermany” (I’m imitating the way mother told the story). When we left the ship we went directly to the Navy hospital where they treated and bandaged the wound.
(Later, in December 1939, the Tacoma was a tender to the German pocket battleship “Admiral Graf Spee”. When the Graf Spee was being scuttled, the Tacoma removed the crew and returned them to Montivideo Uruguay.)
Happy Birthday, @Crane! I had no idea you were 90, or even close to it.
One of the wonderful things about the SDMB and other online communications is that there is no age effect. You get treated the same if you are 16 or 90. In the real world as you point out, even an Admiral can be seen as just an old man walking down the street, to be treated (ignored) as an old man. But if that Admiral were on the SDMB, no one would care about his age but we’d all be awed and fascinated by his Navy experience.
May you post here for many years to come.
Happy Birthday! I will be following your posts
Happy birthday, Crane! And thanks for the post.
This post was very cool and and I hope to read many more from you. Happy Birthday, Crane!
Happy birthday @Crane , from someone exactly half your age. I’ve enjoyed interacting with you over in the photography competition threads, and in the messages you sent about it. 
This is awesome. Happy birthday to you. I’m blessed with two spry grandparents in their eighties who never seem to quit. My grandpa is into fixing everything and takes apart cars and computers to see how they work. My grandmother still goes out dancing until early morning. I once did one of those Fitbit challenges with her where you try to get more steps than the other person in one week, and she absolutely smoked me. It’s such a gift to see how you and they are living life to the fullest, that life is not over when you get old. But it makes sense you would be reflecting on your legacy at this time. Thanks for sharing a part of that with us.
Thanks for your post. Happy Birthday. If you create your own relevance than you never become iirelevant. And if you create your own irreverence, you may well realize that the head waiter at La Hacienda can be pompous by times. If you create your own irreverence, you may yet live to be a hundred, especially if the bread you bake is delicious. Well done, sir.
I play music with a fiddler who is 94. He loves to tell how he saw Hank Willams perform (twice). Somehow the fact that I saw Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground fails to impress him.
Happy Birthday!
My stepfather will be 90 on his next birthday. He was born in a tent in a cornfield during the Depression, delivered by his drunken doctor grandfather. He has buried 2 wives (he didn’t kill them). He’s a Viet Nam vet and a career naval officer who was involved in early nuclear sub program under Rickover. He still volunteers at his local public library, and because he’s the one who will do it, has the job of schlepping cartons of books donated to the library bookstore. He’s out there a couple times a week lifting and carrying dozens of heavy cartons of books. He donates plasma has often as they’ll let him. He doesn’t have a TV, but for fun reads books on philosophy and astrophysics.
StG
Your post was eloquent and moving, and I thank you! Please let me join in the chorus of happy birthday wishes!
I’m 44, and I have this morbid expectation that I’m going to drop dead in my early 50s. I envy you for your longevity. It sounds like you have lived a great life, and there is still more to come!