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"Today is my mother&amp;#039;s birthday.  Phyllis Greene is 91 years old. And still smiling. Maybe she&amp;#039;s still smiling from last year&amp;#039;s birthday. When she turned 90, the whole family came to town. My brother, Tim, transformed Mom&amp;#039;s living room into the Ohio State Stadium, and Brutus Buckeye and OSU cheerleaders joined us in celebrating Mom, a lifelong, born and bred fan.  This year, Tim and his daughter Hannah flew in to watch the Saturday game with her. Brutus didn&amp;#039;t knock on the door, but we flocked around Mom all weekend.  She had sternly (well, as sternly as she gets) insisted that she wanted nothing. No gifts. But here&amp;#039;s what she may not be focusing on: Her birthday is a gift to us.  Today, she and I will eat Stouffer&amp;#039;s welsh rarebit on toast and Pepperidge Farm coconut cake. This is our go\u2013to birthday / Thanksgiving / Christmas/ evergreen holiday menu. We love it so much I wish Norman Rockwell would come back to life to paint our pared down family feast.  I took Mom seriously on the no gift thing.  I did make her a Xerox, though, of a plaque from the FeMail Creations catalog. It reads:  &amp;quot;Good morning\u2026this is God. Today I&amp;#039;ll be handling all your problems\u2026so sit back, relax, and leave everything to me.&amp;quot;  I folded hers in a card with a dog on the front that looked like a fat Lausche.  Happy Birthday, Phyllis Greene. Blessed be.   D.G. Fulford is the author of Designated Daughter: The Bonus Years with Mom, written with her mother Phyllis Greene. She is also the co-founder of TheRememberingSite.org. You can find her at DGFulford.com.  Photo credit: Marcia Smilack "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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