Birthday Celebrations with Spring Flowers and Friends, Kelli’s Book Birthday, Book Giveaway Winner Results, and More Re-Integration into Society

Me posing with cherry blossoms and sparkles for my birthday

Birthday Celebrations with Spring Flowers

Yesterday was my 48th birthday, which we celebrated with homemade black forest cake, a duck dinner, a trip around Woodinville to look at everything that was blooming (and found a brand new baby bunny always a sign of spring), and a trip to a bookstore.

It was a day that started cold, with wind and rain, and turned sunny and warmer. Glenn got me two rare books and some beautiful flowers -a book of Sylvia Plath’s art work and a signed first edition of Siri Hustvedt’s first book, which was an out-of-print book of poetry. I felt very loved on the day with messages from friends, phone calls from my brothers, and generally, while still feeling very much like another pandemic birthday, as good as it could be.

Today I’m going to have tea with my doctor poet friend, Natasha K. Moni, (my second visit with a vaccinated person inside my home! So crazy! Still not used to it!) and hopefully have a movie night with Glenn, maybe the new Tenet (heard it’s incomprehensible, but I like time travel films).

Book Giveaway Results and Winner!

Goldfinch

Congrats to Patricia Valdata, who was the winner (from random number generator) of last week’s book giveaway of the now out-of-print Unexplained Fevers. Thank you to everyone who participated!

I still have a few copies of Unexplained Fevers for sale, and Open Books has a copy or two as well, available at this special link:

https://open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/products/gailey-jeannine-hall-unexplained-fevers

Wisteria in late April

More Re-Integration

I was realizing on my birthday – though the CDC has said we vaccinated folks no longer have to wear masks outdoors or inside with other vaccinated people – that, because of cases rising here, it really doesn’t feel any different yet. The rest of the country’s cases are down, but here and in Oregon, it still feels like the pandemic is raging.

We don’t feel like movies, restaurants, bars, and even museums are totally safe yet – and can’t go, in some cases, anyway, since we are moving back to phase 2 here. I have gone to grocery stores and bookstores, but I didn’t linger in either place. And then visits with my vaccinated friends – those are great, but hugging and sitting around the table – which wouldn’t have been a big deal before the pandemic, still feel radical and strange. So I’m moving slowly towards re-integration – I’ve gone to the dentist, got an MRI, the tulip festival, seen two sets of vaccinated friends – but not running headlong into throngs of crowds.

There is also some question about how effective the vaccine is long-term in people with autoimmune problems and immune deficiencies – which means I really can’t ignore news about variants, studies about antibodies, T-cells, and B-cells, just yet. I really, really want to stop waking up to read covid news (after my meditation app leads me through a breathing exercise, naturally) sometime soon. Remember everyone who gets the vaccine helps protect vulnerable people like me (and children! since they can’t get their vaccines yet), so go get your vaccine! I got J&J and Glenn got Pfizer, and really, neither of us had bad side effects. And it means you can visit people – without masks!

Natasha Moni and me – birthday celebrating!

Anyway, my birthday weekend visit with vaccinated doctor/poet Natasha Moni – only my second post-vaccine in person visit with anyone – was wonderful. We realized we hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half! So we celebrated my birthday (yesterday) and hers (in January). It is so weird to see people in person, to sit around a table eating and drinking just like it was the good old pre-covid day. And Glenn made a terrific spread – chocolate cake, a wonderful cheese tray, crudités with avocado dip, goat-cheese stuffed baby peppers – he even sat down with us – briefly, if you know Glenn – for some poetry and grad school talk.

We talked about favorite poets, jobs, medicine, talked about how medical improvements made during covid might apply to other diseases after the covid pandemic has died down – like MS, cancer, lupus, and other conditions that have taken far too long to get good, effective treatments for. We talked about the benefits and downsides of Zoom doctor visits and Zoom poetry readings. We talked about Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami, Sylvia Plath, and Siri Hustvedt. Anyway, if you don’t have Natasha Moni’s poetry book from Two Sylvias Press, The Cardiologist’s Daughter, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Kelli’s New Book Birthday

Speaking of books and birthdays, besides being my birthday, this was also the week of the book launch (otherwise known as book birthday) of Kelli Russell Agodon’s new book, Dialogues with Rising Tides (see left, with Sylvia, who gives the book two paws up) from Copper Canyon Press. Happy to have my own copy and I’m sending one to my mom for Mother’s Day!

Looking Forward

I hope you have a good year ahead of you. I hope a better one waits for me too. One thing the pandemic highlights is that there is at once never enough time and so much time. (Also the theme of Tenet!) Stop and snip a bit of lilac. Get out in the May sunshine. Kiss someone you love. I am making my birthday wish. You make one too. Wish for another poem.