dual personalities

Sunday is daughter #2’s 23rd birthday. So today we wish her a Hipy Papy Bthuthdy!

“Can you read, Pooh?” Owl asked a little anxiously, and this is what he wrote:
HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY.
Pooh looked on admiringly.
“I’m just saying `A Happy Birthday’,” said Owl carelessly.
“It’s a nice long one,” said Pooh, very much impressed.
“Well, actually, of course, I’m saying `A Very Happy Birthday with Love from Pooh’. Naturally it takes a good deal of pencil to say a long thing like that.”

(In Which Eeyore has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents)

I’m just saying.

This is my favorite picture of daughter #2 from back in the days when her role model was Stephanie Judith Tanner and she was writing a novel called “A Man from Melville”. Probably because she had two active and outspoken older siblings and had endured years of endless teasing, the Belle was always good at entertaining herself. She was so adept at shrugging it all off and going to her room where she could spend hours working on craft projects and reading Christian romance novels. She’s come a long way since then, but thankfully she is still the same old girl with the sunny, forgiving, glass-is-half-full personality.

I have mentioned before that, although as parents we look back nostalgically at our children’s childhoods and we miss “those days” (and our youth), it is truly wonderful when they turn out to be great adults. We appreciate and love them on a whole new level. And it is true that people who have a sunny, forgiving and generally positive attitude toward life are frequently not appreciated for their depth. In daughter #2’s case, this is a big mistake.

Who else but the Belle could have persuaded me to read Moby-Dick?

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Happy birthday and God keep thee!

*A birthday shout out to our girl Sarah Michelle Gellar as well!

Sarah was born on April 14, 1977. As our loyal readers know, her alter-ego, Buffy Summers, shares a birthday with our mother. We consider her kin.