i'm on the cusp of believing in astrology, but i'm on the cusp of everything, so that's not really a surprise, i half believe almost everything until i'm absolutely pretty darn sure it's not true, like for example heaven and hell. but with astrology, everything else in the universe has a kind of order, it wouldn't be that much of a surprise if it did matter when exactly you were born, not that i could trust humans to explain the meaning or reason behind the order, how would we know? but my birthday, now, is actually on the cusp, and it's the cusp of aries and taurus, which at one time was explained to me to be the pioneer and the settler, the traveler and the homebody. i'm on the settler side of things, apparently, by a few hours. details, details. tonight my friends in saudi arabia and iraq wrote in to wish me a happy birthday already; by 7:00 here (it is now about ten) it was already my birthday over there and their facebook was reminding them and telling them to write me. with facebook now the birthday is a much huger thing, nobody can ignore it, although i often ignore or just fail to see a few of them. i have a rough general knowledge of who among my 500 friends or so were born around now and there are actually quite a few of us. pioneers and settlers both. while i was on the computer i noticed that it was fenway park's birthday; it had turned 100 today, its green monster getting ready for another season out there in boston, a place i have always felt some connection to, and a place where i actually lived for a while; i never actually got into fenway, even though i lived maybe four or five blocks away. but hitler is the one who really dominates this day; i feel bad for those who share that date, because it always seems as if the date confers upon you any personality traits at all, any sense of destiny, then what could be worse than sharing that kind of stuff with a guy like him. i on the other hand share mine with the queen of england, jim morrison, may he rest in peace, and john muir, who i also assume would be resting in some kind of peace somewhere. john muir and i know that the original earth day was started in his honor, though the following year it was moved to the 22nd, where it's been stuck more or less ever since, and the queen moved her birthday from april to june because it was so darn ornery in england around the 21st of april, she couldn't take it when it was so cold and blustery. now i may be confusing you mixing these two birthdays into a swirl or a kind of dna helix, but my attitude is that this cusp has been that way more or less all along, at least it has in my experience. you can't after all be a settler, if you were never a pioneer, or if there wasn't a pioneer somewhere, yet at the same time, being a pioneer doesn't mean much, unless everyone around you is pretty much settled, and there are quite a few of us who are both, even in our daily lives, totally settled, totally living in one town, one house, one place, yet at the same time reaching out almost constantly looking for something new, eyes on the horizon, thinking about the grasses on the other side. but now another thing has come along to move this day, the 20th, pioneer day, into a different realm. it appears now that this is "coming-home" day or the day that adoptive parents like us celebrate the bringing home of our adopted child; this happened seven years ago, and actually took two days, stretching out into my birthday one cold and blustery spring just like this, on a long drive from chicago that stopped over in maybe mattoon or some formless unknown place on the highway between here and there. he was a little tyke then, not even three weeks old, and we tell him the story of what chicago was like and what it was like to go up there and meet him and bring him back. this year we celebrated "coming home" day by going out to the local golden corral where everyone ate their fill and the local rural crowd looked at us with their kind of glazed blank looks which i somewhat impatiently refuse to interpret. it probably means nothing, it's just a friday night at the local golden corral and you could see just about anything, and everyone could be as tired as i am and slighty washed out and burnt out from a week of working other people's shifts and being half sick and trying to make sure the kids get off to school. or they could be like the amish who came through town the other day and dropped their jaws and stared when they saw our soccer coach who has a mohawk that goes from pink to purple depending on the day & we're so used to it we don't even look twice, he grew up around here i think and is pretty much part of the furniture no matter what color he makes it. and those amish don't realize people are staring at them too, though they bought grammer orchards about a year ago they really don't come into town that much, and i don't know if the city has figured out yet what to do with a road that has steady horse traffic on it. i'm kind of with the amish myself, moving out into the countryside, grabbing the good farmland, i'm sure they're taking better care of it than we did, with our pesticides and nerve-gas type stuff we use to kill all the critters, all turning that river into a huge dead zone in a massive die-off. they too have their settlers and their pioneers, those who plant a foot and don't budge, have eleven children, take care of the horses and go to town once a month, then there's those who are always in the horse, and can't resist going around the next bend, just to see what's there. you got your hitlers, you got your jim morrisons, your john muirs, then you got guys like me, who celebrate the birthday early, just because i'm in every time zone at once, pretty much anyway, and besides, it's a long holiday weekend, birthday, earth day, but it starts with coming home day: this day changed my life; it taught me a lot, it was the beginning of a new era, a new life, i walk now in different cultures, it was a gift to me, and it made me different, and better. and there is so much yet to come, i'm sure - as one part pioneer, my eyes are already on the next horizon. home is important, yes, nothing could be more important, of course, but then, i've got traveling in my blood too, i can't shake it, i just have to live with this total, constant restlessness, whether i act on it or not. the cusp of all cusps.