I could have done without my phone dying on the eve of an out-of-state trip at an hour when it was impossible to do anything about it beyond frantically e-mail selkie and be distressed, but otherwise I celebrated my birthday with my parents and my husbands and a marzipan cake crowned with an owl of white chocolate circled by candles and cider caramels and raspberry pâtes de fruits and accidentally mint nonpareils. I have packed among my trip books an assortment of '40's pulp novels by Leo Rosten, an ex-library hardcover of William J. Mann's Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star (1998), and Bryher's Beowulf (1948). I am leaving anchor-style at home the print that rushthatspeaks found me of the Somerville Theatre in the days when the Hobbs Building flew a pennant reading SOMERVILLE. spatch thought all day he had remembered a lyric about forty-three and it turned out to be, of course, "Combine Harvester" (1976). He describes the picture he took of me at the Old Belfry in Lexington as my saturnine Edwardian period.