Tag Archives: Birthday

Perfectly Imperfect in Every Way

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In a comment on my gardening post last week, Ted reminded me of the inimitable Mary Poppins, and I was in turn moved to recollect her frank self-description as ‘Practically Perfect in Every Way‘. In the case of that charming fictional character, it was simply and inarguably the truth. The rest of us, mere mortals, can’t quite go that far if we’re honest.

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Saints Cury, Cecilia & Goar. I selected these for portraiture in this modern-medievalist piece because of very earthly interests: Cury is one of my birthday saints and famed mainly for his 'miraculous' hospitality; Cecilia is the patron of musicians (for my husband, of course) and even sometimes purported to be the inventor of the pipe organ; Goar's feast day is celebrated on our anniversary and he, sometimes portrayed as a potter, was thus also an artist. He also happens to have a lovely little town on the Rhine named after him. There *can* be perks to being a saint, even a minor one, apparently . . .

Which is why I like saints. It’s doubtful I’d really enjoy meeting them in person, to be precise: it’s the nature, the character of them, that really fascinates me. Because, as I understand it, what separates the saints from the rest of us ordinary slouches is not that they were born or made saints but that they became saints by rising above the ordinary way they began. Unlike superheroes and the majority of fairytale protagonists, it’s not often a transformation that’s accomplished by the wave of a wand or inadvertent exposure to radioactive substances, but rather is brought about by internal change and will and choice.

There is hope for me in the idea that most saints–and I gather this is true of the heroines and heroes of many significant belief systems, along with many of the major religions–start out as plain, simple, unimpressive and very mortal humans and for one reason or another are moved to do the things they do that gradually re-shape them into extraordinary beings. Some of those avatars, indeed, start out as pretty sketchy characters, if not outright jerks, despots, and other first-rank varieties of meanies. It’s the process, the journey, and the ultimate commitment to do and be something else that makes them extraordinary.

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Saint Monica could be the perfect example of overcoming obstacles--much of her sainthood was earned just through working to see that her ne'er-do-well son shaped up, the outstanding troublemaker who eventually reformed enough to become himself Saint Augustine of Hippo. Apparently her efforts did not go unrewarded . . .

Chances are beyond-excellent that I will never become a saint of any sort. But the real hope and inspiration in the lives of heroes, saints and exemplars is that nearly all of them began their lives as someone or something far less extraordinary than the way they ended them, and if so there’s always a possibility that with a little thoughtful effort I might actually improve along the way too. Don’t hold your breath, but I might just turn out slightly better than expected. Apparently, miracles do happen.

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Saints Valery (a French abbot) and Finian (an Irish bishop)--hereafter known as the Feastie Boys since they're also among my birthday saints. They remind me as well that one can come from different places, times, backgrounds and any number of unique circumstances and rise beyond them all to distinctive heights . . .

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing

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There was a boy . . .photoHe was remarkable, special and fabulous in every way . . . by his own admission. That sounds like a pretty smart-alecky remark from his bratty second daughter, doesn’t it, but you know, he’d be the first to tell you that it simply never occurred to him to doubt himself. Teflon ego? Naive puppy? No, he’s just a pretty cool guy and didn’t see any need to worry about it along the way.

People liked him; he liked them back. One thing leading to another, as they always do, he grew up and became, in various turns, a college graduate, a husband, a father, a seminary graduate, university board chairman, bishop, hospital board chairman, and oh yeah, all those other things. You know: the keynote speaker and community activist constantly playing both conscience and jester to the complacent. The nutty uncle who accidentally fades his snappy burgundy deck shoes to a flashy candy-colored light purple that becomes his infamously funny family trademark and then makes them the coveted trophy passed down from one to the next of all his nieces and nephews as they graduate from high school. The pastor who tells wacky tales from the pulpit that actually explicate complex biblical concepts and help to untangle earthly Issues for everyday humans. The bishop who travels with a phalanx of fellow bishops to act as bodyguard for their danger-exiled brother Bishop of El Salvador in Guatemala and escort him safely for a visit to his people at home. The respected administrator who sees a busy hospital through the building of a whole new hospital campus. The husband who woos his ever-tolerant wife with anniversary gifts of snow tires and garden manure but always remembers a card with an actual romantic note to accompany it. The dad who sends excuse notes involving kidnap by Green Gremlins to the principal’s office after his daughter’s flu absence from school.

My father’s stated policy, from a rather early time in his life, was that Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing, and if it was spoken with a jovial wink, it was and yes, still is pretty much his modus operandi, whatever the endeavor. Underachieving was never an option and half-hearted efforts the same as not trying at all. This insight of his came long before the appearance of the modern day’s sloganeering cheerleaders insistence that one Go Big or Go Home.

photoDad brought along with him from his earliest years that sense of ease with himself and his place in the world and built it into an expansive view of what he could and should do and what the world could be with a little effort. As much as he indulged his playful and witty side (surely one of his most endearing qualities in his every field of action in life) he has always harbored a tender heart as well. Any practical tendencies of his that might be seen as hardheaded or stoic, serving him excellently in his many leadership roles as they did, were at their root driven by a deeper need to look out for others’ best interests and work to keep his own in check. All of this shapes a man who manages to maintain the unusual duality of a highly accomplished Type A leader and the Class Clown, a rare and gem-like formation indeed.

And today is that remarkable, special and fabulous man’s birthday.

photoAs it happens, he’s right, you know: anything worth doing really is worth doing to the nth degree and then just a little bit more. He didn’t get to be this advanced in age and yet still a ridiculously charming kid just barely beneath the gloss of grown-up-ness without having practiced that art well and truly. Happy birthday, Dad!

She is a Bringer of Light

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It’s a beautiful day today.

It’s been raining cats, dogs, longhorn cattle and armadillos all night long in the north of Texas, decorated with streaky lightning and accompanied by the timpani of repeated rolls and crashes of thunder, and the front yard is now a series of canals and minor swamps, the back patio steps a reflecting pool high as my ankles. The grey felt of the sky remained uninterrupted in its scowl from imperceptible dawn to murky dusk, and the low-hanging clouds coughed out leftovers from the night’s storms at intervals all the while. And it’s a beautiful day.

It’s my sister’s birthday. She who came next in line after me among the four woman-children born to my parents is now a year older by our reckoning and all the more beloved as each year passes. It should be no surprise that she is to me still something of a mystery and decidedly a treasure, the first of my younger sisters to be subjected to my admittedly unskilled ministrations in my first job as Big Sister, who (thankfully) proved far too strong to quail at them and yet somehow still likes me.photo collage

It can’t have been easy for her. I will never claim to have been a particularly dandy specimen of a sister to any of them, but since I was sometimes the babysitter-designate and often the closest to hand when this little one was to be led or tended, she probably bore the worst of it. That she was born beautiful, a dainty doll of a creature–despite my fond declaration of “Oh, look at the ugly little thing!” when faced with her fresh out of the delivery room where, to my childish surprise, she turned out not to look like a six-month-old cooing and coiffed infant–must have perplexed me, since I was already old enough to notice that everyone unavoidably fawned over the pretty baby and we old, used up grade-schoolers were dull goods by then.

That she quickly proved to be clever, bright, charming and unreasonably likeable, even by her sisters, could have been an annoyance. That she had interests and intelligence and exponentially increasing skills in areas that to this day remain closed doors to my would-be prying mind (have I mentioned math lately? Sports?? ) could have been supremely irritating and possibly deserving of sisterly sabotage. That she did all of this and much more while remaining cheery and likeable could have simply driven us all over the cliff.

But aside from the inevitable struggles of a girl who discovered she was not only wise and talented and admired, but in extraordinarily different ways from the rest of us and who was additionally a frightful perfectionist and self-critic, she had the Secret Weapon few can wield: she was, and is, a bringer of light.photo

There are certain people who brighten the room merely by vacating it, and then there are those special, miraculous few who can do the reverse magic. My sister is one of the latter rare creatures. I have often thought that it is no coincidence that from when she was quite tiny her favorite color was yellow. The color we associate with sunshine and happiness and precious gold. She is a ray of human light and when I think of how fortunate I am to have three incredibly dear sisters and among them, this incandescent bit of sweetness, I am suffused with sunlight myself.

Happy birthday, dear Sister, and long may you shine. You are a gift and a golden treasure, and loved more deeply than a few words can ever say.

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There is Not Enough Chocolate in the World

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This is the anniversary of one of the truly important days in world history. No, I’m not as confused as you think. (Not in that way, anyhow.) I’m not referring to Christmas and getting the date all wrong (nor Hanukkah or Ramadan or Eid or the Chinese New Year or Samhain and getting the date that much wrong-er). December the twenty-second is, in fact, the anniversary of the birth of my Number One Sister. And that is a very big deal.

Believe me when I tell you that there are not enough superlatives in the world to describe how fortunate I feel to have followed in her footsteps, even if I make up really cool sounding words for the occasion.

My big sister paved the way for me. She test-drove our parents through child-rearing for nearly a full two years before entrusting little me to their care–and hers. She trained them in the ways of infants and toddlers admirably, and continued to lead the way right through our developmental (emphasis on the last two syllables) years, both for the parental party and for her pesky little sister. Why, in fact, she didn’t “accidentally” lose me, sell me to a traveling circus or bump me off on certain occasions remains a complete mystery.

Instead, she was a great playmate and co-conspirator. She was both a good enough student to set up positive expectations of the family lineage when I followed her into her former teachers’ lairs and also enough of a strong-minded individualist that they dared not assume we should be compared–thank goodness, as not only were we always distinct in our personalities and tastes but she was easily a more natural scholar than I was and I’d have drowned in those expectations. And she was Firstborn enough to assert her right to test all boundaries and, occasionally, the parental patience, just enough to make my follow-up look that one necessary shade paler by comparison. That’s us in succinct terms, one might say: I’m pretty good at life’s tasks in general–learning, adventuring, inventing, enjoying–and she’s always a notch more substantively and colorfully so. The great thing from my perspective is that I never felt this as a shortcoming on my part but rather that I’ve lived in the presence of a fine example of levels to which I can aspire. I am working on it.

Meanwhile, back in the land of sisterhood, I have this amazing friend who was waiting for me the day I showed up for my first public appearance and has embraced, cajoled, guided, teased, taught, humored, chastised and entertained me ever since. The exemplar of Big-Sisterhood. One I can say anything to and ask anything of, and she still loves me. Even when I’ve been utterly unlikable (I know, it’s hard to believe I’ve ever been a stinker, isn’t it!), she’s stuck by my side. Or at least waited somewhere backstage to reclaim me when I finished my big scene.

Now, I won’t immerse you in treacly lies and say that I think anyone is perfect, not even my sisters, as fabulous as they all are, but I wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. When I showed up on the scene I was immediately gifted with a built-in mentor and companion, and that has never altered. So when I say Happy Birthday to my big sister, it’s always doubled by my sense of having received her as my own first birthday present too.

From that point forward, she has been coaching me in all of those skills and arts most meaningful in living a full life: curiosity, assertion of self, living by one’s convictions, passion for those people and things that matter, playfulness, generosity and a good appreciation of the ridiculous. She taught me, more than anybody else, how to laugh until my face aches and my lungs are bursting and tears are shooting out of my eyes as though I’d had a squirt-gun transplant. And she taught me the proper respectful adulation of all-things-chocolate.

How’s that for a long way of saying there aren’t enough words! But you know what I mean, especially if you have been lucky enough to have a sibling (let alone three) so worthy of hyperbolic paeans. Yes, I think it’s grand that all of those other marvelous and perhaps more widely recognized holidays and celebrations are right ahead, but I have every reason to celebrate this date with elation and a great deal of gratitude, so if you feel like raising a toast or hugging your sister or setting off some nice fireworks or sending my sister a chocolate cake (with chocolate filling and chocolate frosting and hot chocolate on the side) or anything, feel free to join right in and consider this a very worthy day for such things. Happy Twenty-second of December!digitally enhanced photo

Daring to Live the Adventure of Life is Its Own Reward

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The wonderful Eve Redwater (http://everedwater.wordpress.com/) gave me a generous gift on my birthday. I’m not sure it was intended specifically as a birthday present, but it was aptly timed so I’m certain there was at least some synchronicity at work in the event. See, I operate under a very contentedly delusional science system in which I, the sun, am always finding ways that the universe and all of the wild diversity in it revolve around me and conspire to do good to me and for my benefit. On the heels of Lady Eve’s kind gift, I was contemplating how to respond appropriately to receiving the Versatile Blogger Award from her and, virtually simultaneously, both got into a discussion via several posts and comments on my blog and those of several friends (thank you, CF, Smidge and Co.) about the roots and responsibilities of our creative lives and was reminded by my own birthday that my late godmother’s birthday was imminent. And yes, they are all interconnected–what a coincidence, eh?–in and through me.

It all meets at that point of origins + inspirations once again.

Getting involved in blogging was quite a milestone in my progress as an artist: the culmination of a large push I’ve been making toward steady, committed practice and broader sharing of my work, and also a starting point for working with a marvelous new community of inspiring and educated peers and mentors in the online community to expand my horizons to places I can’t yet imagine. No surprise, then, that it also begs the questions of where I started, where I am now, and where I might possibly be heading. That’s what’s on my mind a lot lately.

A significant part of the whole equation is that I have parents who raised all four of their kids to be unabashedly themselves and do their own thing. Of course, being semi-normal mortals, we all had our periods of self-doubt, frustration with finding out just what our own ‘thing’ might be, and any number of other growing-up issues. Having loved to draw and write and do any number of similar, incredibly unworldly things from very early, I was haunted fairly often–not least of all in my undergraduate days–by worry about how ridiculously impractical and selfish it seemed to study, then major in, and commit to a life’s work involved with the arts. I mean, really. Mom and Dad patiently assured me at all points that I should do what I felt called to do and be who I thought I was made to be, and I thwarted all of their efforts with equal stubborn force of hemming, hawing and hunkering fearfully behind innumerable university requirement courses before I would willingly and publicly admit to my addiction to art. [Ed: I like that when I typed ‘art’ just now, my computer offered to “correct” the word by writing “artichokes“, so it apparently recognized that I was in such denial it wanted to help me by disguising my intentions even from you, faithful readers!]photo

The upshot of all of this muddling around and foot-dragging is that I approached my junior year of college without having dared to declare a major, and I skulked around like a sneak-thief in the hallways of the art building and spent significant amounts of time maundering and mewling about the whole ordeal when I really ought to have been simply plunging in and getting soaked in all of the art I could lay my grubby little hands upon there and then.

Oh, woe is me! Boo Hoo, and all that. I thought I was supremely talented at evasion, but of course my parents had a secret weapon trained on me from the very beginning, and it was activated during these very tenuous years of my faltering development. It was a pair of super-agents they called my Godparents. My parents, it happens, besides being nifty talents in the parenting department, had the smarts and/or temerity to choose as godparents for their children some people that took the whole parental-surrogacy aspect of the job quite seriously. Mine were a couple of Mom and Dad’s closest friends from the quartet’s days together attending (you may be beginning to feel the frisson of familiarity, the sting of synchronicity, here already) the very same uni where I was now paddling around in a diminishing spiral of destiny-denial. Furthermore, my Godma, as I called her, and The Godfather, as he was known to me (for being, thankfully, the polar opposite of that fictional character), had long since taken up employment at said institution as a Business Office administrator and head of the department of Radio and Television, respectively. So I could go and see my Godma when I was paying my tuition or trying to find out where my last scholarship had wandered, or just when I needed some bucking up, because she was seriously skilled in dealing with all of those aspects of my college life. Her estimable spouse was housed in another building, across Red Square from her digs, and I had a little journey through the catacombs of the old dustbin to drop in on him, which trek I gladly undertook on certain occasions when I wanted a different flavor of encouragement from hers, or–gasp!–artistic advice.

See, with The Godfather, I could go all clandestine and it seemed right in character, so I didn’t try to pretend with him that I wasn’t heading in an art-ish direction, though which one of many directions was still quite cloudy in my crystal ball. After all, there was that James-Bondish crawl through dusty and dimly lit corridors in a faintly creaky building just to find him in his office. And of course there was the visiting, during which he would puff away on his pipe and I would pretend not to see or smell it, because Officially he had “quit smoking” and his wife “didn’t know” he still did it. Apparently he thought that her willingness to admit to relation of any sort with me proved she was non compos mentis, and I was certainly in no position to argue that, so he pretended not to smoke and I pretended not to be coming in every time to whine that I couldn’t sign up as an Art Major because that was just plain irresponsible and stupid. I would go ahead, maybe, with an English degree and get ready to teach, because at least that might lead to, oh, I don’t know, a paycheck or something like one. My godparents, bless their dear departed craziness, never once chastised me overtly for being, oh, I don’t know, irresponsible and stupid by not doing what I really felt called to do and exercising what little native wit or talent I might dig up in my education to do what I was perhaps meant to do. But somewhere along the line the gentleman with the invisible pipe neatly skirted the issue of what-to-do by saying, in effect, Never mind what you think you’re supposed to do, or even what you want, this is about who you ARE. He proceeded to clarify by telling me that it was perfectly obvious to him and to anyone else that might have spent thirty seconds or so in my company that there were certain compulsions and eccentricities that I couldn’t exactly gloss over that earmarked me plainly as an Artist.

I won’t say that I never questioned the whole thing again, but somehow Mr Wise Guy pressed the right button at the right moment so that what my parents and sisters and friends had all been eternally encouraging me to do and be suddenly was revealed as so much more dazzlingly clear and excellent than when I had been studiously ignoring them and covering my ears and singing LA-LA-LA-LA! at the top of my voice to drown them out the whole time.

This is all a mighty stretched-out way of telling you that I still believe life and all of the fine creatures surrounding me in it work pretty hard to steer me in happy directions and plunk dandy gifts in my path all the time. That many supportive people and useful events in confluence led me down the primrose path of Art; that a life lived in the midst of said art connected me to a whole lot of additional supportive folk and dropped me amid numerous other grand gifts; not least of all, that opening up the stubbornly barred gate to my own artistic playground was one of the really great gifts life has given me and I can’t imagine not living life surrounded by all sorts of ARTICHOKES! ARTICHOKES! ARTICHOKES!

Oh, you know what I mean: Art.photo + text

Get Out Your Super-Spy Gear: the Future is Inscrutable Yet Inviting

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graphite drawingWhen my sisters and I were kids, the Cold War was still chilling the spines of two cranky paranoid continents to pretty much the polar-offset temperature of today’s heated heights regarding relations between, say, anywhere in the middle east and the US. So we regularly crouched under our little school desks in Cold War air-raid drill positions that would’ve made us a whole new and much more crouch-y Herculaneum if Da Bomb had ever actually been dropped on our noggins. The fact that my early heartthrob Morgan M [name redacted to protect his dignity, if any] had vomited all over our shared desk when the Hong Kong flu swept through our school might’ve made my particular spot-de-crouch that much more stalactite-covered and sculptural, had I dared to look upward, but really, there was no greater sense of danger in those classrooms than the one that some teacher might decide my huddling wasn’t taken seriously enough, so crouch I did.

I also, along with my sisters, considered playing cowboys-and-Indians pretty generally passe, so 1950s, don’t you know, and eschewed that popular pastime for the much better use of our coolness in playing Secret Agents. That we never actually spied on anything more exotic than our own basement Rec Room or went on any mission more hair-raising than to demand a pitcher of green Kool-Aid from Mom to take out to the backyard where we would guzzle it until we were bursting and then run around in sugar-high mania having our Spy-vs-Spy battles (only slightly less ludicrous than those in Mad Magazine) was irrelevant; being Secret Agents was cool, was jazzy, was scintillating and ever so grown up. Naturally, we didn’t have the remotest idea what a spy was or what secret agents of any sort did for a living/dying.

What we did have was a whole lot of green-sugar-water-fueled shrimpy persons’ fun. And then, on a really good day, we’d come inside and have nuclear-orange macaroni and cheese for dinner and some outstanding stories from Dr Seuss or perhaps the infinite child-rearing wisdom of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to top it all off. We were surrounded by the unspeakable dangers not only of the Cold War but of playground equipment made of heavy steel pipes and undergirded by solid concrete; by houses full of asbestos insulation and lead paint, foods crammed with deadly cyclamates and Red Dye No. 2; and of freely roaming streets full of unlocked houses with total strangers living in them and packs of mainly-unsupervised neighborhood kids playing Kick the Can on the same roads where cars full of seatbelt-repellant maniacs tore around smoking unfiltered cigarettes and spewing plumes of black exhaust every which way.

In my current glorious old age, I am quite delighted that I never had to be rescued from the depredations of cigarettes on either lungs or bank account, that I have a car with seatbelts and airbags and GPS (not a chance in the universe that I’d find my way around the old neighborhood without that), and that I have apparently lived to this advanced vintage with my teeth and internal organs basically intact and not even artificially dyed red. I’m pretty darn delighted to be, let alone to be healthy, well off, surrounded by wonderful people, and even able to remember some of those youthful dangers. But I’m still amazed by the will of modern, educated people to believe in all sorts of dangerous fictions. (I will leave my political commentary at that for today!)

Can’t say whether my love of more benign–designed for entertainment– forms of fiction, fantasy and mystery stemmed from that wilderness of seen and unseen ‘hazards’ menacing my youth, but all of that inherent excitement surely must have had some influence, on the whole. So I thank my parents for not over-protecting me from woodland fort-building and steel-wheel roller skating and river inner-tubing and from meeting the neighbors and all of that reckless craziness. And I thank my lucky stars and guardian angels and many random strangers that I have come through all of it so remarkably well that I look forward quite enthusiastically to the second of my half-centuries from here. No matter how completely that entire range of years is wrapped in mystery at this point.

So for my self-gifting and self-congratulating (I’m very good at both, as you know) on this my 51st birthday, I’m posting a couple of self-indulgent (also a talent of mine) fond and foolish reminiscences and a couple of my mystery story drawings. And wishing all of YOU a very happy day and a marvelous, surprisingly excellent year to follow: I’ll share my day with you if you promise to make it a grand year too, as best you can!

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No doubt the clues are all there, but there's something to be said for just continuing to go along on the adventure and seeing what happens . . .

Happiness may be Ephemeral, but It’s Sure Worth the Effort

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Jack Benny portrait

We-e-e-ll! I'll just have to think about that for a bit . . .

People from all over the world have been sending Happy Birthday messages to our house today, not randomly mind you, but because my life-partner-in-crime is–I’m not making this up–commemorating his birthday on this very date. Hard to believe he isn’t simply frozen in time, if you have seen the guy or met him, he not only looks younger than he is but thinks and acts with a decidedly youthful joie de vivre.

Unlike the late, great Jack Benny, my spouse has no desire or need to perpetually revisit his thirty-ninth birthday. With Mr. Benny, granted, it was an amusing ongoing joke from a man playing a parody of himself as a vain, self-centered cheapskate and a wildly deluded hipster-wannabe. And the joke only worked so well with him because he was widely known not to be any of those things in real life. Biographical tales of the real person Benjamin Kubelsky grew up to be make it clear he was genuinely charming and talented and worked with remarkable dedication to achieve the appearance of a lazy, egotistical and rather hapless fool constantly stymied and bettered by others and the world in general and utterly mystified by it all. Central to his concept of being a performer was that it was his responsibility to offer top-flight entertainment for his audience, and if that meant giving all of the laughs to the other actors at his expense, or featuring musical guests with a high profile on his programs while lampooning his own quite skilled violin playing, he was more than content to do so, and always the first to applaud them with genuine admiration.

Not surprising that such a man would be remembered by so many with such deep and enduring affection, nor that despite any dated references and lack of stylistic currency, his comedy when heard and seen nowadays still has such resonance.

There is a small truth that I must own for the sake of full disclosure: my grandfather looked and acted a lot like Jack Benny. While Mr. Benny died when I was still relatively young, and even more so for that matter did Grandpa, the television program was still being regularly broadcast far enough into my youth to be imprinted on my memory distinctly, and seemed quite often an echo of my own Grandpa’s sly and selfless sense of hilarity; coupled with a slight physical resemblance between the two, this means that watching the Jack Benny program can be a little like watching (unusually well-produced) home movies of my grandfather. Most distinctly, the many times I saw each of those long-gone delightful men falling to pieces with laughter, usually at someone else’s witticisms or clever moves, made me conflate them somewhat in memory. And I knew that for both, it was an innate sense of urgency in pursuing the joy that was floating right around them that drove the amazing commitment to seeing, feeling and creating happiness.

An utterly different approach from that of my grandma. Granny honed her joy-craft willfully and out of necessity, with not much more in the way of a starter kit of ingredients and tools handed to her than a bit of protective sisterly love and her own power and imagination. Her childhood and youth were colored by parenting that evidently ranged from neglectful to grotesquely abusive at times, and she certainly had neither wealth nor fairy godmother nor any other great advantage to bail her out of that, but as her adoring grandchild I never saw the remotest hint of any of that. What I saw was a woman with a rich capacity for laughter and love and endless patience for showering her grandchildren with massive doses of both. She not only pulled herself through her early years on her own strength but became a lifelong expert at choosing happiness and knowing how to conjure it into existence, seeking the right people to populate her life, situations in which to immerse herself, and the wisdom and determination to see the good in all. The result, as I lived in it, was an extended family touched at every point by Granny’s warmth and playfulness and delight in laughter and happiness. How can anyone not fall in love with that?

No mystery, then, that I would not settle for anything less in a lifelong love partnership than another expert in seeking and making happiness everywhere he goes. It’s a distinct part of how he manages to come across as younger than not only his chronological years but the experiences he’s lived and, sometimes, weathered along the way. This man was gifted from birth with great parenting and a happy childhood and youth alongside a terrific brother, so he could be said to have gotten a better natural foundation than my grandmother’s ever was–but like most people, he’s seen his share of hard work and emotional trials and certainly, some wrenching losses. Those may be par for the course: everyone is affected at various points in life by unwelcome troubles and certainly by the disasters around him and the deaths of people close to him. What’s not so common is the ability and will to deal as graciously and sensibly as one can with life’s inevitable blows. It’s this skill and art–born, bred and cultivated–that make him a distinctively wonderful person who manages to build an atmosphere of contentment and positive outlook around him.

It’s what makes him see the world with a rather forgiving skew yet one that knows only a sense of humor will pull him through and out of any undesired mire. Better laugh than cry, any time! Needless to say, he makes me smile; he makes me laugh. He’s not going to be switching to a career as a stand-up comedian anytime soon (and neither of us can remember a joke from one end to the other) but he sees the funny side of so much, and just the sight of that unaffected smile, those blue eyes scrunched up with a mischievous twinkle, the sound of that musical laugh–can brighten the dullest or darkest moment instantly. I can think of a whole lot of other things to like and love about my husband, but on his birthday I can say with great conviction that his ability to bring happiness to me and many other people around him is one of the things I appreciate the most.

There was no fancy party to celebrate the occasion of this birthday. Scrambled eggs for dinner, a little dish of homemade vanilla ice cream later in lieu of any glamorous festive dessert. Quiet time doing some work to prepare for tomorrow’s various jobs and tasks. Sitting together later in the TV room watching some pre-recorded stuff and just reaching over occasionally to hold hands and smirk at each other like teenagers, because it still amazes and amuses us to have found each other and be having such a truly happy life. Only takes a very little bit of effort along the way, and what a marvelous byproduct real happiness is. So, fancy or no, without any cake and candles or fussy doings of any sort, kind of an ordinary day of work and busyness, but in the end, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, a really Happy Birthday.

May there be many more!