Three Wishes, No, Four, No, Twelve

            I have a magic lamp experience once in a while, where anything I wish for seems to plop down right in front of me. Usually this happens around the beginning of June, when at least a dozen friends and relatives share a birthday week with me.

            This year, the magic wishes didn’t start out well, with a summer cold which caused me to miss the party and to accompany the Chorale concert the next day with bleary eye and stuffy nose. But things began gathering momentum Monday morning when two phoebe birds, long absent, alit on the chicken coop and the telephone began to ring.

            The best presents sometimes just appear, like the rose-breasted phoebes.

    The mail brought quilt pieces made by my grandmother nearly a hundred years ago, and the gift was seeing her frugal craft, tiny scraps pieced together, the smallest of stitches. In the course of the day, poetry in Greek and English appeared, and flowers, music and tomato plants. The afternoon students all played nicely, Debussy and Bach and Mozart.

            At about 4 P.M., Carlos, the instrument maker, called and said he was bringing back the little violin I wrote about last month. The 14-year-old owner of the restored violin was just finishing her piano lesson. Her expression, when Carlos handed her the violin, was indescribable.

            There had been no way to know how the violin would sound before the work was done and the fiddle had strings.

            Another gift: June Morrall e-mailed me, asking if I would do a story, so I wrote about the violin a few hours after we heard its voice for the first time. The grand finale of the garage sale Curatoli violin appears on June’s site, www.halfmoonbaymemories.com.

            The most important wish was granted Tuesday when the doctors declared that Nicodemus was free of the hated disease. That would have been enough for many birthday wishes, but the wonderful intangibles continued.

            By Thursday, I was ready to be done with wishes for a while (we hadn’t even found time go out to a birthday dinner), but then Arl appeared with roses from her garden and eclairs and some new writing.  And my favorite San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote and said he was going to include an anecdote I sent him in his next Monday’s column.

            Two neighbors called and asked if we wanted their tickets to Tosca. We gobbled leftovers, threw on clothes, drove to the city and found a free parking place a half-block from the opera house...only to find adorable Camille Offenbach (decolletage, cowboy boots) and her gentlemanly husband sitting in our row.

            “I lived for art and love,” Tosca sang, and we blew our noses and wiped our eyes, though of course you can’t watch the end of Tosca without thinking of when Beverly Sills jumped off the set’s painted cliff onto a too-springy hidden mattress and bounced right back up again in full view of the audience.

            Tosca was marvelous. High up in the San Francisco Opera House, the seats are so steeply banked that you get dizzy when you look down, but there are two large screens which unfurl nearby, giving you better closeups of the orchestra and the singers than you could get with front-row seats.  Puccini's villain, Scarpia, reminded me of a former United States Vice President. 

    So that was the birthday week: The week was dizzying, and we still haven’t had time to drink the champagne we bought.