birthdays – Fluid Imagination

Today was my forty-first birthday. When I woke up, my daughter was incredibly excited to give me the presents she and her mother had purchased for me just the night before. I was in the shower, and she ran into the bathroom to tell me that she was going into the guest room to wrap the present. Several minutes later, she came in to tell me that her mother was going to help her because she (my daughter) isn’t very good at wrapping presents.

I toweled off, put in my contacts, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, put on deoderant, opened the bathroom the door, and walked down the hallway to my bedroom. She followed on my heels, the bag of presents in her hand. I put on a pair of boxer briefs and sat on the bed. She climbed up next to me. Her mother leaned against the doorway.

I opened the bag. They’d placed a card on top of the presents. My daughter’s eyes opened wide in anticipation as my fingers picked at the folds of the envelope. I don’t remember exactly what the card said, but it played a noise when you opened it, and that’s what she was waiting for; she burst out laughing at the sound.

I laid the card aside, and my daughter said something about it not being Christmas. It took me a moment to figure it out, but the wrapping paper they’d used on the topmost present was Christmas-themed and my daughter didn’t want me to think she didn’t know it was Christmas. I opened the present. It was a desk-sized fan that came with a banana clip —— so you can, you know, clip it onto the side of something. My daughter was so excited about the banana clip. I looked up at my wife confusingly, looked back at my daughter, smiled, said thank you, told her how much I loved it, and gave her a great big hug and kiss.

At the bottom of the giftbag were two Halloween-sized bags of Kit-Kats. I smiled at her again, said thank you, and gave both her and my wife a kiss.

It wasn’t until about 12 hours later that I was able to appreciate their gifts for what they were.

Say what you want, but it’s true: I love fans. I’d have a fan blowing on me all night and day if I could make it happen. It’s not a temperature thing (per se); I just love the feel of air moving across my body.

My wife does not love fans. She puts up with them because she loves me, but if she had it her way, we’d live where the heat presses down on your body like a heavy-weighted blanket. I only mention this to demonstrate that there are, in fact, people who do not love fans.

But I am not one of them, and both my daughter and my wife know this about me.

I also love Kit Kat bars. This is a love I don’t very much advertise. Anyone who knows me knows of my love of Sour Patch Kids, chocolate ice cream, and Doritos, but my Kit Kat love — that one’s just for me. I only buy them in the checkout line of the grocery store, and they are usually devoured before I leave the parking lot, their little wrappers shoved back into the far corner of the hard plastic pocket on the inside of my driver’s side door, far from the prying eyes of anyone but me.

My wife and daughter don’t often go food shopping with me. We go as a family maybe once or twice a month, but the rest of the time, I go alone. I don’t specifically not buy Kit Kat bars when they are with me, but I do specifically try to prevent my daughter from asking me to buy her candy, and so whenever we grocery shop as a family, I try to rebuff my own Kit-Kat-desiring urges so as not to inspire her own. While I know my wife and daughter have definitely seen me purchase a number of Kit Kat bars over the years, I did not know they had seen me purchase them enough times to realize my secret love for them.

So, for my forty-first birthday, my wife and daughter gave me two things I most unquestionably love: a desk-sized fan with a banana clip, which means I can bring it with my anywhere, allowing me virtually nonstop access to the feeling of air moving across my skin; and two whopping bags of what has quietly become my truly favorite candy.

If that isn’t a demonstration of their intimate knowledge of who I am and what I love, then I don’t know what is.

Which means, for my forty-first birthday, my wife and daughter gave me the only gift that matters: a reminder of how thankful I am to be in their lives.

I told my daughter tonight that of all the years I’ve been alive, this past one has been my favorite. I hope she knows I meant it.

Today I asked my students, “What are you doing? Like, seriously, what are you doing?”

It didn’t take them long to get it. Some understood within seconds, others took a few seconds longer. One of my students presents as severely autistic, but even he understood the severity of my question.

What, in fact, were they doing? Not just right now, but also, only right now: what were they doing with their lives?

I only asked because the night before, I asked myself that same question. I was not being judgy. I did not ask it with a harsh tone. Sitting on the back porch, looking up at the stars, I simply wanted to know: what was I doing with my life.

I’m grateful to be able to say I was proud of my answer.

I am talking to people.

I talk to my wife as often as I can.

I talk to my daughter about everything we can imagine.

I talk to my boss; I talk to my coworkers — I consider all of them my friends, and some of them among my closest friends.

I talk to people I haven’t seen in days, weeks, months, and years, family members, high school and college friends, people I once met somewhere and only for that once.

I talk to people on Facebook when I’m able, even if only by liking what they’ve shared.

I talk to my students in honest and authentic ways about anything I think might help.

I talk to you — whoever you are — to let you know you’re not alone.

I’m proud of what I do. I get to talk to people as openly and as honestly as I can about anything and everything that any of us can imagine (with our fluid imaginations…get it?).

I asked my students that question because I wondered if they believe they have a gift, and if they do, if they’ve discovered how best to use it.

My daughter’s fifth birthday is next week. On Sunday, we took her to her first concert, the Grand Point North festival on the public lakefront in Burlington, Vermont. One of her favorite bands appeared on the setlist, as did one of mine. It seemed like kismet, and so my wife and I decided to make the concert her birthday gift…

(for the record, I would have taken her to the festival even if one of my favorite bands wasn’t playing, and I told my wife we could leave the show well before the time limit she had set for the evening, which meant I missed more than half of my favorite band’s set — I’m not complaining, I’m just saying…I didn’t get my daughter this gift just because I wanted to play with it too 🙂

…and she loved it. She was a little hesitant at first, but once her favorite band started to play, she loosened up, and by the end of the night she was dancing on the lawn, swinging glowsticks, and chasing a red balloon. In addition, she got to have two bowls of ice cream at two different times during the night; she ate her favorite food — cheese pizza (made entirely from Vermont-grown and Vermont-harvested ingredients, though she didn’t know it) — while sitting on the rocks and watching the Sun set over the waters of Lake Champlain and the peaks of the Adirondack mountains. She got to throw large stones into the lake for a really long time. And she spent an entire evening with her mommy and daddy, who are genuinely her two most favorite people on the planet.

It was an evening that was wholly gratuitous. She received all that the world had to offer her — music, food, family, community, and the natural beauty that comes from the interaction of water, the Earth, the sky, and the Sun — in a word: she received love.

It cost her nothing. She asked for nothing. And it was simply given.

That is what it means to have a gift. She received that gift from us, and now, rich with the world’s extraneous grace, she is prepared to offer it to someone else.

Everyone has a gift like that.

It’s that thing that comes out of you that seems to mean something to someone else. That gratuitous grace that is yours to give.

That’s your gift.

And every day you should do two contradictory things with it: give it away and cultivate more of it to grow.

So now, rich with the knowledge of your gift, I ask you, “What are you doing? Like seriously, what are you doing?”