Multicultural birthday greetings

You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time — the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album) [evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph] for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act. Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. The senders: the Finnish-French linguist Riitta Välimaa-Blum (RVB); and the Chinese-American linguist Zheng-Sheng Zhang…