LOOKA MY BABY, (MOSTLY) ALL GROWED UP

My (firstborn) baby and me: Elder Daughter helps us celebrate my 60th birthday last fall.

Today is Elder Daughter’s birthday.  It’s hard to believe - for me, anyway - that she’s been walking the planet for thirty-four years now, because there’s still that bit of Daddy’s Little Girl she carries around with her.

And yet, it’s no trouble at all for me to imagine her as a fully-fledged adult.

She’s been on her own now since getting out of college a dozen years ago.  Among her many talents, she is a performer, an artist, a creator, and a farmer.  She has worked in the corporate world, both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, all the time managing to find time to create and perform in all sorts of stageworks.  These days she lives a busy life, managing to keep the wolf away from the door while completing the second year of graduate-level Advanced Performance Art training.  Who else (with the help of her sister, the Mistress of Sarcasm) would compose and perform a mini-operetta in the style of Philip Glass in honor of my sixtieth birthday?

Plus, she makes a mean challah.

I am in the enviable position of having children who both learn from me and from whom I am able to learn.  They get their prodigious common sense and people skills from their mother, the most estimable She Who Must Be Obeyed; from me, they have inherited an appreciation for the musical works of Frank Zappa.

Elder Daughter, I love you.  Enjoy this birthday (and many, many more to come, keyn ayin hara)  in good health - may it bring you everything you wish for, without limit to any good thing.