In about an hour, people will start to descend on my home. I spent a few hours last night cleaning. This afternoon, it's all about final preparations. Frosting the cake. Clearing off the dining room and kitchen tables. Setting out plates and silverware. Going out and buying some pop (that's soda to you non-Michiganders).
It will be a good afternoon, full of laughter and good-natured teasing. My beautiful daughter will smile and accept the attention, for once. Generally, she avoids being in the center of any gathering. She prefers to lurk in the corner, hiding behind her red hair.
A Classic Saint Marty from two years ago, where I was trying to come to terms with being the father of a 15-year-old . . .
December 5, 2015: A Good Son, Daughter's Fifteenth Birthday, Peter Thabit Jones, "Birthday Walk"
He prayed for a good son, and when he was born named him Robert, after his adoptive father.
Ives lives for his family. Nothing is more important to him. His wife, Annie. His son and daughter, Robert and Caroline. They give his life meaning and joy. His favorite times are going on walks with his kids, holding their hands at busy intersections. Jumping in the car and taking day trips to upstate New York, sight-seeing and dreaming of homes with gabled roofs and gardens. Ives starts planning for his happily-ever-after the day his son is born.
Today is my daughter's fifteenth birthday. A decade and a half ago, at 7:29 a.m., she came screaming into this world, pink as a summer sunrise. Up to that moment, I wasn't sure about being a father. I thought of myself as a basically selfish person, unwilling to give up my late evenings with friends, movies every weekend, short and long trips with my wife. No strings tying me down.
And then I held my daughter for the first time, and I felt my heart cracking open like the San Andreas Fault. I had no idea that my life had been missing something. She was beautiful, smiling and calm, for the most part. I didn't mind changing her diapers. At bath time, we would sing songs and splash each other. Halloween was candier. Christmas was brighter. The world was, somehow, larger and smaller at the same time.
So, today, I celebrate my daughter. Fifteen years young. Dancer. Flutist. Singer. Gamer. Sulker. Eye-roller. Early Christmas present. My wife will be battling the bell ringers and Christmas crowds this afternoon to finish our birthday shopping. Tomorrow afternoon, we will have cake and ice cream after church.
Now, if Saint Marty could just get her to make her bed...
Birthday Walk
by: Peter Thabit Jones
Walking the dazzling rim
Of the Pacific,
The Grecian-blue sea
And mythological rocks,
I feel the mortal
And sense the eternal.
I am a child
At the window of wonder,
A man spellbound
By a living prayer.
To begin
To imagine
Just one breath of God
Is to attempt
To place a tiger
On the back of an ant.
I stand and I watch
The ocean
Making love
To the humbled bay.
And a poem for this birthday party day . . .
Age of Miracles
by: Martin Achatz
My
daughter has reached that age
when
her body unfurls
gospels
of growth all night,
psalms
filled with arm, leg, hair, sweat,
breath
staled by the tilt
from
girl to woman. She will soon
inherit
gifts. Blood. Ovum.
Creation.
Then
she will be lost to me. Gone
on a
long journey across desert, mountain,
to a
distant Bethlehem.
This
December, she tells my wife
she
doesn’t believe in caribou
flying
over glacier, tundra. Questions
things
like seraphim choirs,
kingdoms
at the North Pole,
donkeys
that sing “Dona nobis pacem”
on the
winter solstice. I know,
she
says, nods as if she’s accomplice
to
some divine conspiracy theory.
So I
write her this poem
about
last Friday, when twenty inches
of
snow fell in Cairo, Alexandria,
Jerusalem. Brought the entire Middle East
a
silence it hadn’t heard in 112 years.
Children
in refugee camps danced
in the
blizzard, made rosefinches
with
ice bodies, palm frond wings.
No
bombs. No bullets. Just white.
Everywhere. White upon white.
From
the Mediterranean to the Mount of Olives.
It’s a
miracle, little girl,
like
the smell of baked ham and cloves
on
Christmas Eve, or the sound
of
your first breath
the
morning you were born.
