Highlands Roadrunner celebrated his 73rd birthday on Wednesday by – how else? – running four miles the first thing in the morning. I included two intervals at the Picnic Area and returned on the beach, which is always a glorious way to end a run and celebrate a birthday. For lunch, we went to the Beach Tavern & Grill, just down the road in Atlantic Beach and for some reason under our radar. It was a 50-year-old Mom and Pop place – Mom was our waitress, Pop was cooking in the kitchen (today's special: lasagna), and daughter (who began working there at the age of 13) was at the bar. It was very good, and we will return again. For dinner, Martha treated me to a nice dinner of tapas at Circa 81, a restaurant we have enjoyed in the past but not been back to since Covid, and it too was very good.
My friend Skip was among the many friends and relatives, including my sister and daughter, who contacted me and wished me a Happy Birthday. “Still not another age group yet,” he texted,
and it was true, although as I replied to him “For an old guy like me it is
often 70 and over.” My octogenarian friend
Fred ran such a race last year, but when the race director learned that he was
82 years old when he finished, he created a new age group on the spot of “80
and over.”
My celebration of another birthday, a loving wife and daughter and many friends, of life and health and fitness, was darkened the very next day when we learned that Russia was invading Ukraine. We have been watching the news and it was not unexpected, but still it is a shock to see images of innocent Ukrainian civilians huddling in metro stations with their children and their pets, here in this cosmopolitan country in the 21st century, the beautiful historic city of Kyiv being hit with ballistic missiles. Surely this is as significant an event as Germany invading Poland in 1939. There is no reasoning with a KGB thug like Putin, but it is at least encouraging to see our country taking the lead in organizing a world united (mostly) against such an unjust and evil act of war.
It is almost difficult to enjoy ourselves when we stop to think of the hardship that the Ukrainian people are enduring. So we continue to run, to walk on the beach, and to try to stay fit. Martha checked out a water aerobics class at a facility in Morehead City that, like the Beach Tavern, was under our radar. I had been working out at the City’s Recreation Center pre-Covid, and before that at a place called Anytime Fitness. This facility is simply called the Sports Center, and in addition to the water aerobics there are full-size indoor and outdoor swimming pools, basketball/pickleball courts, a large space for yoga and aerobics, and even two racquetball courts. And most spectacularly of all, there is a huge gym with four large rooms for Nautilus-Cybex and free-weights – every imaginable kind of exercise equipment. It finally seems safe to work out again in a gym, and we have both visited many times since discovering it the week before last, Martha enjoying the water aerobics and yoga and me exploring the weight rooms.
It’s what we do when we have another birthday: strive for fitness and health. As the poster that I have hanging in our house says, these birthdays are not for sissies.
It was another sunny but very windy day on Friday, so we
went hiking at Fort Macon again, this time on the salt marsh portion of the
Elliott Coues Nature Trail, which is more sheltered from the south wind. We began on the Yarrow Loop, where we have
been on bird hikes before, and immediately we saw a juvenile ibis, just like
one that has been hanging out at the driveway to our condo. The juvenile is brown, and as it matures it
acquires patches of white before finally turning completely white. My photo did not do the little fellow justice,
but when we continued around the trail, we came upon this spectacular sight: a
multitude of ibises roosting in the trees.
I did not count them but Martha said there were 73.
Martha continued on the trail toward the Picnic Area, where I later picked her up, but I was interested in seeing Fort Macon itself, something I had been meaning to do while we are here. They installed this impressive World War II gun a couple of years ago, an original 155 millimeter caliber field gun that would have been used for defense in that war. Despite its age, I couldn’t help thinking that our Ukrainian allies would be happy to have a few of these right now.
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