This is Tim blowing out his birthday candles, and although it seems as if the cake is on fire, it is not. It is another of the messy creations I am destined to bake forever after. Tim called it a minefield (!). I think that I am happy this is the last birthday for which I need to make a cake, and I hope I never have to make another cake, although this one did taste particularly nice.
Tim has always been my knight in shining armour, which is a cliche I like. Once we were having an accident, travelling sideways at breakneck speed towards a major intersection, my mouth trapped open in terror, and he's holding the steering wheel with one hand, patting my knee with the other, saying, "We'll be fine, Anne!"
We tried to raise a baby fruit-bat that Emma found clinging to its dead mother's body once, and Tim had hardly anything to do with it, he felt some aversion to it although he tolerated our desperate love for the creature. Then the little bat sickened after 9 weeks, but Tim was the one who got deathly sick from it, landing in the hospital for 3 days on an IV pumping all kinds of drugs into him, touch and go. (We found out later that no one handles fruit-bats, they carry the deadliest diseases on earth, for some weird reason.)
I had had an operation removing a pterygium in my eye, so was wearing an eyepatch, and had to drive him to the hospital with very little depth perception, using my good eye. He could barely open his eyes, having had a the worst headache in the world all day, having actually vomited big gobbets of blood, which was why I was taking him to the hospital. He was in such pain that he barely felt the lumbar puncture they gave him, which is very painful indeed, apparently. Anyway, we're driving in the car, and I am totally overcome with worry, when he pats my leg again, and says, "I'll be fine, Anne, you should have those people over to dinner anyway!"
In the night the bat died in my hand, and I buried him, our little Batman, and I drove to the hospital very early in the morning, and sat there sobbing at Tim's bedside. He woke up and said, "I'm going to be ok, Anne," and I replied, in a barely intelligible voice from all the crying, "No, the bat died!" and carried on weeping.
And once, our friend Keith acquired a brand new state of the art mountain bike, and offered Tim a go on it. So he goes off down the street and we're all standing on the stoop, watching, so when he comes past he does a trick, or attempts a trick, the one where you put on your brakes so that your front wheel remains on the ground and the back one lifts up like a bucking bronco? But Tim didn't realize how strong those new brakes were, and so when he pulled hard on the brakes, the bike stopped so violently that it actually did buck him up into the air, so high in fact that a car-driver coming along the road in the opposite direction thought that he was falling out of a tree! On the way down to the ground he locks eyes with me and shouts, "I'm fine, Anne!" and then splats on to the tarmac!
We were riding home in his car on Tuesday after dropping off our lemon of a car that we bought for the boys, and I had driven it down to Medford and become enraged at how we had once again allowed ourselves to be diddled. So he says, "Well, perhaps it stems from an eternal optimism, perhaps we just want to believe that people are inherently good, which is a good thing, don't you think?" And yes, it is, and it made me laugh, and I laugh as I write this because here we are, two people who are side by side on this journey through life, the weirdness of it all, the terrible amazing frightening surprising beautiful world. Our experiences are unique and individual and modified by our sexes, but the joy is in our accord, in the telling of our stories, in our 26 years of shared history.
Here is another picture I took of Tim (and THE MESSY CAKE) tonight, quite blurry and strange, but nice nonetheless.
In Campagny will be continued tomorrow.
Happy Birthday Tim!!! 51 looks good on you!
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