Happy 40th Birthday to my First Born!

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young.

Today, my oldest son, Douglas Pike, will celebrate his 40th birthday.  I cant quite wrap my head around this distinction. When did he get so much older?  I don’t remember growing older… when did he?  For me this has become a real admission ticket into the world of being considered a senior citizen.

For the first time I feel the impact of the passage of time because of my first born’s birthday.  I think the reason for this feeling is, first, that I so greatly remember the day I told my husband we were expecting.  Both of us still so terribly young, me not yet 20 and Doug had not yet turned 23. We were so excited and scared to death both at the same time. Douglas was my dreamed of start of the family I so longed for and of course Doug REALLY wanted a boy.  We did not do testing at all to know the sex of our children but I knew I was caring a son… our golden child.  How I loved decorating his room and eventually buying a crib set that was the exact replica of the Queen Mary’s Captains quarters.  Such precious days gone by far too quickly.

I also vividly remember being 40.  I remember my thoughts and my dreams.  I remember our family life and what we did and where we were heading (sometime with great sorrow and fear).  I think I remember all of this with such joy because I enjoyed that time of my life so thoroughly.  It was a time of lovely innocence for us all.  So when I reflect back on my son’s 40th birthday, I can’t believe the years have run through my fingers like water when you scoop it for a drink.

My son is 40 today!  Wow!  But the word “Forty” truly is inaccurate because it doesn't stand alone. Forty is 39 and 28 and 24 and 16 and 10 and 4 and 6 months, and 5 minutes old; every age a person was – not simply the sum of its parts but every one of its parts.

Forty is the infant, the child, the teenager, the young adult, the new husband, the dreamer, standing side by side. It's the toddler, the Cub Scout, the high school freshman, army recruit.

But you look in a mirror and, with human eyes, see only what is now. One moment. One person. You don't see, because people aren't like Russian nesting dolls, all the people who are inside the 40-year-old.

But my heart still sees. My heart sees Douglas, in his first blue suit bought her when him when was 1; on an Easter Sunday morning, squinting into the sun;  I see him climbing the school bus in his expensive brown leather boots (Buster Browns) that cost so much his dad and I ate eggs for three weeks to pay for them; hugging his cat, Bandit; walking across the lawn on his first day of high school; storming up the steps because I wouldn't let her do something; dressing for his Junior High Prom (he was voted King that night and actually had helped to put the whole thing on); dressing for his wedding where I was not only mother of the groom but Matron of Honor
Yes, my heart sees then and now and everything in between.

His father's heart saw, too. He saw Douglas on the bike I taught him to ride and behind the wheel of the car he taught Doug to drive. He saw him off to his trip to boot camp and cried all the way home.

Yes, I still see him as child more often than I see him as an adult. Oh no, I am not stunned by my son’s age. I look in the rearview mirror and see all he has been. I look at him now and see all that he is. And I think 40 is good. It has all been good.

You know, I still call him “little Doug” and in my mind he will always be my baby boy.  But then, like it or not, I am his Mom and I am allowed to call him anything I want.  He is still that precious baby boy, inquisitive toddler, and bright/gifted little boy to me. He always will be.

Happy Birthday, “little Doug”!  I love you with all my heart. Your Dad is looking down on your as well today from Heaven and I know he is beaming with joy and love.  You were and will always be so very precious to him and to me.

I love you son… More than you will ever know. 

The Stroll (of Enlightenment)

Although I have known the story behind C.S. Lewis' conversion to Christianity for decared, I thought I would share it with all of you as it not only deals with three of my favorite writers but also with the time of miracles, faith... and yes maybe even magic.  After reading the post below, please pick up the books that have mentioned and read them; some perhaps for the first time and others for the second or third. Read them with new eyes of understanding.

On a warm September night in 1931, three men went for an after-dinner walk on the grounds of Magdalen College, part of Oxford University. They took a stroll on Addison’s Walk, a beautiful tree-shaded path along the River Cherwell, and got into an argument that lasted into the wee hours of the morning — and left a lasting mark on world literature.

At the time, only one of the men had any kind of reputation: Henry Victor Dyson, a bon vivant scholar who had shared tables and bandied words with the likes of T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. His two companions were little-known Oxford academics with a shared taste for Icelandic sagas, Anglo-Saxon verse and the austere cultural mystique of “the North.” Few people remember Dyson now, while millions celebrate the names of his companions: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Yet the works that made their reputations — “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” for Tolkien, “The Chronicles of Narnia” for Lewis — were profoundly shaped by that night-long argument and the bond it cemented. It’s possible that Tolkien’s Middle-earth would have remained entirely a private obsession, and quite likely that Lewis would never have found the gateway to Narnia.

“Lovers seek for privacy,” Lewis wrote in “The Four Loves” (1960). “Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not.” Lewis and Tolkien quickly found this cozy solitude after they met in 1926, during a gathering of the English faculty at Merton College. Both men had fought in World War I, and come back scarred by its industrial savagery. They had seen the worst the 20th century had to offer — up to that point, anyway — and took paradoxical comfort in studying blood-soaked Viking Age stories of ambiguous heroes and gods battling monsters and the outer darkness, tales short on the milk of human kindness but long on sardonic humor. (“Broad spears are becoming fashionable nowadays,” a character remarks in “Grettir’s Saga,” just after being pierced with one.)

In the pitiless Old Norse universe, gods and their human allies face inevitable defeat, but there is no thought of surrender or negotiation with the monsters besieging them. The brave and the cowardly all come to the same end — what then must we do? “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination,” Tolkien explained in his famous 1936 lecture on “Beowulf,” “that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the center, gave them victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.” In the struggle against evil, there is no shame in defeat — only in not fighting.

The solution seems to have made a bigger impact on Tolkien’s writing than on Lewis’. There is an unmistakable Icelandic chill in the air when Aragorn, faced with a catastrophic loss in “The Lord of the Rings,” asks what hope is left, then answers his own question: “We must do without hope. At least we may yet be avenged.”

Lewis approached “the North” from the literary side, while Tolkien was a philologist immersed in the sound and history of languages. He could be spiky and opinionated: After their initial meeting, Lewis called him “a smooth, pale fluent little chap — no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” But by the next year, Tolkien had invited him to join a group known as the Coalbiters, who were devoted to reading the Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse. (The name was a play on “kolbitars,” an old Icelandic term for tale-swappers who sat so close to the communal fire that they were almost literally biting the coals.)

Every Thursday evening the friends would gather by the fireplace, slippers on their feet and drinks at their elbows, to hear “The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki” or “The Saga of the Volsungs” or whatever epic was under study. The Coalbiters faded in the early 1930s, to be replaced by the Inklings, an informal group that lasted over the next three decades, with Tolkien and Lewis as its key members. (Much more about them can be found in such books as Humphrey Carpenter’s “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography”and Colin Duriez’s new “Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Story of a Friendship.”)

At the time of their meeting, both men were uneasy about their literary prospects. Tolkien’s curriculum vitae consisted of a 1925 translation of the important Middle English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” along with a 1929 essay on “Ancrene Wisse,” a 13th century manuscript offering advice for “anchoresses,” or female monks, and “Hali Meidhad,” a medieval tract praising virginity. His mind was awash in anxiety over half-completed and languishing projects; “Leaf by Niggle,” his 1939 tale of a painter who can never find time to complete an ambitious work, is accepted by Tolkien scholars as a byproduct of these worries.

Lewis, for his part, had published two books of the type automatically described as “slim volumes of verse” — no further explanation necessary. He had yet to find his voice as a writer, let alone anything worthwhile to say with it. “From the age of 16 onwards,” he wrote in a letter to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves, “I had one single ambition, in which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment; and I recognise myself as having unmistakeably failed in it.”

When he got his first look at Tolkien’s fiction — an early run at the love story of Beren and Luthien, a cornerstone of Middle-earth’s invented mythology and and a tale with tremendous personal associations for Tolkien — Lewis recognized a man who could spend long years grinding away at a single story, but who also had his own voice and used many of the pagan source materials Lewis loved. To his lasting credit, Lewis reacted to this discovery not with envy or jealousy, but with spontaneous and generous delight.

On that fateful night in 1931, Lewis was in the midst of a fretful return to religious faith. Raised as an Irish Protestant, he had become an agnostic as a teenager. Though he came back to accepting the idea of a divine presence in 1929, he continued to resist Christianity. It remained for Dyson, a High Anglican, and Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, to push him over the threshold — though it literally took them all night. As they marched back and forth along Addison’s Walk, Tolkien argued for the literal and mythological truth of the Resurrection of Christ.

By all accounts, the key moment came when Lewis declared that myths are lies, albeit “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien replied, “No, they are not,” and demanded to know why Lewis could accept Icelandic sagas as vehicles of truth while demanding that the Gospels meet some higher standard. Hours past midnight, Tolkien finally went home to bed, leaving Dyson to carry on the campaign. Tolkien’s argument — that the Resurrection was the truest of all stories, with God as its poet — may not sound particularly convincing to nonbelievers (nor indeed to some Christians), but to a man committed to the idea of myth as the only way to express higher truths, it was irresistible. Two weeks later, Lewis told a friend he had once again fully embraced Christianity: “My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

The effect on Lewis was explosive. Beginning in 1933 with “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” Lewis produced a torrent of books, essays, novels and radio talks, all works of Christian apologetics or stories with obvious spiritual preoccupations. Even as he churned out these works, Lewis prodded Tolkien to pull together and complete his stories of Middle-earth — the private universe that had preoccupied him for most of his life. Thanks to that ceaseless, friendly prodding, Tolkien published “The Hobbit” to great acclaim in 1937. The prodding continued during the long, fitful gestation of its outsized sequel, “The Lord of the Rings,” which finally saw the light of print in the mid-1950s. “The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien recalled. “He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.”

Today, I wait to watch the new sun that rises for a sleeping world  As I watch the breaking of the dawn, I see that everything speaks to us of passion, everything is alive, everything has spirit and it invites us all to simply -- cherish it.

Years ago, I read a marvelous poem, actually an elegy, written by Thomas Grey titled "Elegy in a Country Courtyard". The poet wrote this particular piece as he wandered through a graveyard back in 1750 at twilight -- very much how as a teenager, I would wander Mount Albion and contemplate on the meaning of life, the toil of those who had achieved and of those who did not. I would think, and still do, of the mockery of ambition, the struggle of both the rich and the impoverished to be happy, and the eventual realization that no matter what our circumstances in life, we all finally rest in some fashion "upon the sweet lap of earth". Gray felt that this was not much as simple joys are forever gone, destiny is obscured;

"For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn

Or busy housewife ply her evening care... 

the paths of glory lead but to the grave."

However, in my walks through that cemetery, and recently among cemeteries here in Mesa, Apache Junction, Bryce Utah, and the Oak River Creek where I scattered my beloved Doug's ashes... I do not feel that sense of despair. I used to take rubbings of old tombstones (kind of want to do that again in my 60s if I can) and in some ways came to know and love the people long ago laid to rest beneath them. It was there that I often sat and wrote prose or poetry, singing a song of praise for every day that we have remaining... writing an elegy for every day that slipped through my life unnoticed and unappreciated. Thanking the Universe for giving me eyes that can truly see and a heart that can truly feel.

 How many people are aware of their own poet/songwriter inside? Far too often in this surreal techno world we move through our days in a fog or a frenzy -- until we are startled into consciousness by an unforeseen threat to something we hold dear and have been taking for granted for far too long.

I call these opalescent moments "simple epiphanies" because they jar me into a profound awareness of how much we have, and how much we have escaped, and how much there is to be grateful for. My beautiful granddaughter, Jessica, asked me (close to our last wonderful weekend spent together) why I did not seem to be bothered by things. I smiled and told her that it was not that I was not bothered, as I often was, but that I was able to know what was most important to me now... and that is love, and peace and following my own path. I call that GRACE.

Through the mystical alchemy of Grace and daily gratitude, what might have become an elegy to my life, is transformed into appreciation, joy, and exultation. My own recovery or that of a loved one who has been seriously ill, the reconciliation after a painful breach between mother and children, the realization of how very lucky we are if we are doing work we love or, in this current economic climate, if we are working at all, the rejoicing that surrounds us at a long awaited rite of passage, the enormous satisfaction that comes after completing an overwhelming task and, one of the most important to me today, is the serenity that awaits us after a struggle has been abandoned.

The loss of my beloved Doug, Cancer, the anger of children, the absence of a beloved grandchild, the love and support of friends, my doctors, and my job, are my epiphanies and they teach me to cherish everything. Everything speaks to our souls, with great passion, if we are still enough to listen and willing to hear.

Jane Seymour once wrote "You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content."

Amen Ms Seymour. Amen.

Although I do have regrets, I know, even more deeply today, that I have given all the very best I had and that I have lived my life in a way in which I am proud. Am I perfect? Hell no. Will I make mistakes in the time God still gives to me? You betcha...

 But I will write a song of thanksgiving for every day that remains....