Happy 100th at a social distance
Two dozen neighbors stood on chalk marks in a Berkeley street, which is how you do birthday parties these days.
It wasn’t just any birthday party. It was the 100th birthday party of their beloved neighbor Zona Roberts, who doesn’t get overly rattled by pandemics or anything else. She said she lived through the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s and just missed the flu epidemic of 1918. For her party on Wednesday afternoon, she wasn’t wearing a mask, but she was wearing sparkling turquoise sneakers and a rhinestone tiara.
“How do you get through one of these?” she said. “Same way you get through every day of your life. By living carefully and thoughtfully and sometimes angrily, when it’s called for, and always lovingly. And a big box of pastry helps.”
There was no birthday cake because passing out slices and keeping social distance don’t really go together. Her neighbors stood in the middle of Eton Avenue in South Berkeley, each partygoer getting his or her own blue X to stand on, 6 feet from the next X.
Roberts gazed from her front porch at her friends and waved, and they waved back. There was a bouquet of tulips in a vase and a pair of balloons that wafted in the spring breeze. A couple of neighbors brought presents, placed them on the front steps a healthy distance from Roberts and then retreated.
Tenyearold neighbor Mateo Aranguren brought his guitar and strummed “Happy Birthday” for his friend. He said 10 and 100 are almost the same, except for the extra zero, and that this was his first pandemic and it was taking its toll.
“I’ve been washing my hands so much my skin is cracking,” Mateo said.
Another friend, Joan Leon, made Roberts a lavender pillow out of an old coat that Roberts had thrown away, and the two friends had a laugh over how old things have potential.
Over the course of her long life, Roberts played a role in the disability rights movement. She is the mother of the late Ed Roberts, who contracted polio at 14, attended UC Berkeley while using an iron lung and founded the groundbreaking Center for Independent Living. Zona Roberts has been living in South Berkeley for three decades, making friends, counseling people with disabilities, going to yoga class, reading the daily newspaper front to back, and sprinkling her conversations with an occasional fourletter word when warranted.
She stood up briefly when her neighbors burst out into another “Happy Birthday,” but then she sat down again.
“I’ve got bad knees,” she told them, “to say nothing of my butt.”
Her yoga pal, Lisel Schwarzenbach, stood on her chalk X alongside her dog Jelly Bean. She said her friend was a role model who inspires everyone she meets.
“She’s not nervous about the pandemic,” Schwarzenbach said. “I am, but she isn’t.”
Another neighbor, Nancy Silver, brought her friend a half dozen lemons from her tree, because Roberts likes lemons.
“That’s her message,” she said. “Live well, be kind, and enjoy lemons.”
A pal gave Roberts a push down the sidewalk in a brightred wheelchair. She stopped at the home of nextdoor neighbors Carrie Evans and Paul Sytsma. At least the sixth rendition of “Happy Birthday” was offered up in hearty voices, which is how you have to sing it when everybody is a social distance or two from everyone else.
“We’re going to bake our own birthday cake in your honor tonight and eat it ourselves, and we’ll be thinking of you,” said Evans.
“That’s the way to do it,” Roberts replied. “The idea is to enjoy every bite you can. Then get someone else to do the dishes.”
The bingo game with Sugar the dog must go on at the Cypress at Golden Gate senior community. And it has, sort of.
Every couple of weeks, students from a service club at St. Ignatius High School would drop by the meeting hall at the complex on 19th Avenue in San Francisco to run the bingo game, the one with the $5 grand prize. Three club regulars, siblings Tom, Jack, and Kate Quach, would bring Sugar, their brown Pomeranian, who would be given a bingo card and a little help from the Quaches in covering the numbers. Sometimes Sugar would even win the game.
But in these shelterinplace days, the game was called off and so were the students’ visits to the center. So the three siblings made a short video of themselves and Sugar playing bingo.
In the video, the game goes down to the final number, which is G59, and Sugar wins. Dogs have been enjoying all the extra stayathome attention during the pandemic, so winning a bingo game is just a little something extra.
The video has been shown to individuals at the senior center, and it’s a big hit.
“To all the people we have been playing bingo with for such a long time, we are missing you right now,” says Jack on the video. “Playing bingo means the world to us.”
“That’s the way to do it. The idea is to enjoy every bite you can. Then get someone else to do the dishes.”
Zona Roberts