Happy Birthday to Dave

David’s birthday was yesterday (day before yesterday by the time I post this). It was a “milestone” birthday for him and because of Covid, we couldn’t keep our original plan.

Our original plan was to travel to Denmark, where he spent part of his childhood. We will do this someday, when Covid stops circling the globe or when there is an effective vaccination for it. But for the moment, we had to put our plans on hold and celebrate the best we could.

It was a low-key day.  Our big plan was for Dave’s traditional birthday dinner: Mac and cheese and steamed broccoli. (It doesn’t sound like much, but our mac and cheese is ridiculously decadent, very rich.) Dave wanted berries and ice cream for dessert, so that’s what we had, spiffed up with some whipped cream. Dave had wine with dinner. I had fruit punch.

While we had dinner, I looked up some restaurants in Arhus, Denmark, the city that we had planned to visit. Aside from smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches), I am unfamiliar with Danish foods. I was surprised to find that in addition to the expected amount of fish, they eat a ton of pork. Like, all their special occasion foods are pork-heavy and their national dish is some kind of roast pork. I mean, I’m down with some BBQ, but they don’t do BBQ like we do BBQ. They do big hunks of roasted pig. (Maybe when we go, I’ll just bring some BBQ sauce with me, the way some people travel with peanut butter or American style ketchup.)

Dave has fond memories of Danish sweets—they’re the sprinkles and/or chocolate on buttered bread kind of people—and of course we have the ubiquitous Danish pastry, which is Denmark is called (maybe) weinerbrod (Vienna bread). I should have gotten some salted licorice for Dave, also a Danish favorite.

But instead of that, I got Dave a couple of other things:

He’s been talking about wanting to do some yoga at home, so for his birthday I got him a yoga mat and some padded floor tiles so that we can lay out a cushioned area to do yoga on. Our floors are large saltillo tiles—beautiful and completely impractical for yoga. (The yoga mat arrived on time, the floor tiles are somewhere out there, hopefully making their way to us.)

Maybe the tiles will be here in time for Dave’s half-birthday, next January. In the meantime, we’ll do what we’ve been doing for months: adapting to this strange time.