CAKE AND CANDLE TIME

Elder Daughter, June 2011. Photo courtesy Aaron Thompson. 

This is your Birthday Song!
It isn’t very long.
(sung to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay”)

* * *
It’s time once again to trot out the cake and candles... a roundabout way of saying that Elder Daughter today marks the completion of yet another trip around the Sun.  Which is also a roundabout way of saying that it’s her birthday.

Of our two daughters, Elder Daughter is - in the estimation of most of the people who know her - the one more like me.  This is not a compliment; it is merely an observation.

And yet, in so many ways, she exceeds me.

She is brave.  How many people are willing to set aside a comfortable corporate career in order to pursue a dream in the arts?  How many people are willing to expose their souls to an audience in the context of a performance?  Or to pick up and move to a farm, there to learn the Fine Art of converting plants and barnyard creatures into food?

She has the kind of personality that lights up a room.  Set her down in the midst of a party: Within minutes she will know everyone in the room (if she hadn’t before) and will have made hundreds of random introductions.  Networking?  She is its virtual embodiment.

She is insightful and perceptive, able to see many different facets of complicated situations and personalities.  Well traveled, too.  She has been to places that I have only dreamed of going... along with a few that I’d never dream of going.  (And I’ve been around.)

She can be hysterically funny... or deadly serious.  Put her in a room with the Mistress of Sarcasm and enjoy the sisterly chemistry.

It is one of the frustrations of my life that she lives a full day’s drive away.  But that’s nothing new.  She hasn’t lived within 650 miles of us for over fifteen years, alas.  Which makes the time we spend together even more precious. 

I am proud of her... and I am proud to be her daddy.  Happy birthday, Elder Daughter!  Ad meah v’esrim, as we Red Sea Pedestrians are wont to say: May you live to be (at least) 120, in good health and without limit to every good thing.