Sure it is! after all, the older you get, the more opportunity you have had in your life to make friends. Thanks so much for all the support I have received from you, my friends, community, family, and “fan club” for my United Nations Adventure blog. I did appreciate all the birthday cards and greetings and phone calls and e-mails and e-cards. We certainly don’t have an excuse not to “reach out and touch someone” these days, do we? But let me tell you about the once-in-a-lifetime gift I got: someone made a donation in my name to the Bronx Zoo, and for that I get an animal named after me–a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach! For sure I will have to go to the zoo to see my cockroach. Do you think I will be able to tell it from all the rest? Maybe they have branded it “MM!”

My birthday celebration started last Thursday with jellyfish–a new dish for me–at a restaurant in Chinatown, where the UNANIMA staff celebrated two office birthdays. There were also “100 year old eggs” to try, and the green leafy tops of snow pea plants to furnish our vitamin A for the day. Earlier the same week we had celebrated Lunar New Year (because we have two Chinese sisters and a Korean student in our house, we can’t call it just “Chinese” New Year). The dining room was hung with dragons, “lucky money,” firecrackers, and other red ornaments. We each got a gift, and a red envelope of “lucky money” to put under our pillows, so it felt like Christmas. Christmas and a birthday the same week, oh my!

Friday night we saw another opera at Lincoln Center, thanks to more free tickets. This was a comedy, Don Pasquale — I hate to admit that I always claimed not to like opera, but that was when I just heard it on the radio, before I saw it on the stage with the sets and the acting. Saturday we attended part of a film festival on women’s issues at Barnard College, a women’s liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University (Thomas Merton attended Columbia, as a young man). Whew, I was ready to get back to work on Monday…

And what is it like to eat jellyfish? Very much like chowing down on rubber bands. But you–go eat some chocolate and have a Happy Valentine’s Day!