Gotta Love a Birthday!

 TWO close family members are having  birthdays today but one is so busy with fatherhood and husbandhood it will be all we can do to take the little family out for a quick bite.'The other, our daughter-in-law Christine, seen here with her youngest, the baldest prom queen on record... ....allowed as how she and Carrie and the three bambinos would just as soon stay in and eat takeout pizza and watch the Red Sox. (Chris and their oldest son  were actually AT Fenway Sunday night for that unforgettable game. Yowser!) We'll do a real celebration for these two on the weekend,Today I also got to help celebrate the 84th birthday of Lois Goddard, a friend who is just turning 84. Our darling mutual friend Gloria set out a table worthy of the Winter Palace in Czarist Russia and we drank sherry and feasted on homemade cream cake and ice cream rolled around in pecans and huge tasty strawberries.Gloria asked all us  guests to write and recite a poem for Lois and every one of them was clever and  touching. Whenever I try to write a poem of this sort I tend to hang it all onto the coat hanger of Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, whose rhyme-scheme seems to be stapled permanently into my head so I did just that and stood to read it when it was my turn.One would-be guest, who is 90, realized  at the last minute that she had a conflict so what did she do? She wrote a limerick on the spot and emailed it to me and here it is, right above this picture of Lois herself,  holding a bouquet of roses and all our teary  love. 

"Since I have no gifts as a bardI  found it incredibly hardmy brain simply dodderedWhen I tried to rhyme 'Goddard'All the best to Miss Lois GodDARD!"