What I want on my birthday (swunked from sartorias - never let a good idea go to waste)

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So, tomorrow I turn 46.

Here is my wish, for anyone dropping by, who has a few extra seconds: you share with me some special memory. This was sartorias' suggestion, which I cannot improve upon: I know how busy people are. It doesn't have to be long. One good thing about having a brain wired for image is that the briefest reference to, say, "The day i saw a triple rainbow" brings immediately to mind the day when I was ten that I saw a triple rainbow. There I am on my bike, riding downhill as fast as I can because the biggest rainbow ends, so clearly, right where Linda C lives, at the bottom of the hill below school, where two streets converge...the light is silvery-gray, and smells of wet pavement and grass, there are three levels of clouds and all of them ragged. How I loved the magic of that day--even if the end of the rainbow kept moving. But somehow it was better to never find the end.

And incidentally: happy birthday to bdunbar and to the lovely purple_mirie!

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Just because its you....

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday.

St Valentine's day, nine years ago this past February about 10:00am. I'm sitting in front of the fireplace, newly surrounded by a black metal cage that seals off both the fire itself and the stone surround. My wife is in the kitchen, cleaning, for the third or fourth time that morning, surfaces that were spotless to begin with. I'm more nervous than I have ever been in my life and the clock moves more slowly than I can imagine, I check it two or three times to make sure it hasn't stopped.

A car turns into the driveway, and I can see the driver just ten or twelve feet away from me, a large friendly woman I've grown to know well over the past three years, she smiles at me with a smile so broad it threatens to split her face open. Now I'm terrified, this is really happening. I shout for my wife and we walk to the front door. The woman is out of the car now, bending over the passenger seat and fiddling with straps and buckles. She steps back.

"Do you want to take her Peter?".

I reach in and lift a small child out of a car. She coos and laughs, her hands coming up to my face and grabbing at my beard.

"I just need you to sign something" says the woman, "and then I'll leave you be, but call me if you need anything!".

I probably nod my head, I've heard the words but their meaning doesn't register. We go into the house sign some papers and the woman leaves. The little girl struggles in my arms, she wants down onto the floor. I set her down and she uses the sofa to drag herself onto her feet. Very steady for ten months old, she walks back and forth between my wife and myself, neither of us quite knowing what to do.

Finally we decide we ought to feed her, my wife makes the bottle and the little girl is placed onto my lap. I hold her, feeding her the warmed milk, when the bottle is empty she throws it across the room, lowers her head into the crook of my arm and falls asleep.

In that moment, that tiny moment of time, all my fears and doubts disappear. In a few hours the social worker will be back to take this little girl back to her foster parents. Three more days of visits like this and then she will be with us forever.

Until then I'd been terrified, would I be able to bond with a child that was not my own? Would there be a distance, a gulf between us, did I really, really want to do this. Now there was no question.

She's ten now, and the idea that I could ever have had any sort of doubts seems utterly insane.

Re: Just because its you....

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And may it be a happy and loving relationship for the rest of your lives. Thank you.