Happy birthday to me!

By Deana Nall
The Baytown Sun

Published August 2, 2006

Shameless self-promotion.

That’s been one of the perks of writing this column the past three-and-a-half years.

How many times has my column included some mention of how cute my children are? Or better yet, a picture proving my point? Too many to count. Hey, you’d do it, too.

So, with Aug. 2 falling on a Wednesday this year, and with this being one of the last columns I’ll be writing for The Baytown Sun, I thought I should take advantage of this unique opportunity and make an announcement.

Today is my birthday.

And, because this is my column and I get to decide what to include in it, I don’t have to tell you how old I am.

I will tell you this: I’m the same age that two of my favorite musicians, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Stevie Ray Vaughn, were at the time of their deaths.

Let me assure you that they died young. Oh, so very young.

Mozart, like a lot of people in 18th-Century Austria, died of some illness we modern-day folks no longer need to worry about. (Scholars still argue about exactly which illness.) Stevie Ray, a native Texan, died in a helicopter crash after a concert in 1990.

Have you ever thought about how many truly gifted musicians from Texas have died young? Off the top of my head, I can come up with Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Janis Joplin and Selena.

Not to be morbid, but if you’re a musician from Texas and you notice you’re getting pretty famous, you might consider finding another vocation. Or at least stay away from tiny little airplanes, drugs and crazy people with guns.

That would probably be a good rule of thumb for just about everyone, now that I think about it.

But enough of all this death. It’s my birthday, for heaven's sake.

So how am I celebrating? Let’s see. Because we are moving to Arkansas next week, we are busy putting everything we own into boxes. We are also closing on our house today. Then church. Guess that’s about it.

For the past several years, the real birthday party for me has occurred on the weekend following my birthday — known since 1999 as “tax-free weekend.”

Tax-free weekend has almost become a religious holiday for me. In my working-outside-the-home days, taking tax-free Friday off so I could be in the stores by 7 a.m. with my birthday money was an annual ritual. Now I just sneak away from the kids whenever I can or drag them through the mall with me at lightning speed.

I’m a little concerned that some of the joy may be taken out of this year's tax-free weekend because of an alarming fashion report I read. You know what's coming back this year? Skinny jeans.

This is how cruel the fashion industry is. The last time skinny jeans were cool was in the ’80s, when women my age were teenagers and insanely skinny. Now we’ve given birth a few times and we're around the age Stevie Ray Vaughn was when he died. And we’re supposed to fit back into those things?

Anyway, thanks for sharing my 30-something birthday with me. In a couple of years, I’ll be as old as Glenn Miller was when he died. Then I’ll be getting old.

Deana Nall lives in Baytown with her family -- for now.