Today I Celebrate…

There are dates on the calendar every year when we pause to remember some thing, some event, some one. Some of us have calendars littered with ink, and others of us keeping with a digital revolution get notifications with the sound of a small bell and a reminder.

Yet some days, we just know.

This morning I woke up at 9:50AM in a silent home hearing only the wind rustling the trees outside my window.

Good morning, Lord.
Tuesday. Laundry day.
The 18th. Dad’s birthday…

I don’t exactly do well to make complete sentences upon waking.

I’ve felt a bit childlike, appropriately so, in my prayerful approach the past few days, asking the Lord to please allow me just a moment of awareness of my dad. Just a reminder that would be so of him and from Him that I wouldn’t mistake it. For whatever reason, my often unsentimental heart needed it more than ever. A whiff of his cigar. A glimpse of a stranger in a crowd that looked like him. Anything, really. It’s been so long, it would carry me for years.

Months ago I decided to choose something each day to celebrate. I usually only put it on parade in my heart and mind. Today! Today I celebrate….

However, I drove this afternoon to a little cupcake bakery, bought a treat and drove home. I pondered how ordinary my day had been so far with decreasing laundry and increasing quantities of sweet memories of my dad.

Although he’s been away from us for 21 years, today would have been his 75th Birthday.

I set the cupcake on the kitchen island and went upstairs to switch, load & fold more laundry. It wasn’t long after that I learned my Aunt Michelle, my dad’s only sister and safe to say one of his best friends, had passed on.

It was as though I could hear my dad say, “For my birthday, I want my sister here with me!”

And I believe he got it.

I smiled and then began sobbing.

Today I celebrate his adventurous spirit (which he did not genetically pass down to me), and his love of food & laughter and friends & family (which he did)… and blew out a candle in honor of what would have been his 75th Birthday.

 

 

~ by hthr on October 18, 2011.