Happy Birthday!

I can see her in that face--sort of. She wasn't 1, not quite. That aged, cracking photograph was taken many moons ago. I could say how old she is today, but it's not polite to show her age--or wasn't, many years ago, for women at least. Age, like children, people said, should be seen but not heard. So I won't mention it.

But I will say this: we could not recreate the scene. Dad's gone, after all, and, even though the girl I married is not at all hefty, his lifting her would have been a job well beyond his limitations for a ton of years before. He was 100 when he died. 

I'm not sure I know the grove. It may have been just west of the house she grew up in, but if it is, it looks nothing like it once did. It would be nice to have that blanket, but I'm guessing it's long gone. Her mother wasn't a hoarder, not a bit sentimental. 

The only element of this old photograph that remains is that sweet child, who some time ago already left childhood behind. She grew up entirely oblivious to there being a lakeshore Wisconsin or a town named Oostburg, or a town kid, a boy, her age, who spent most of his time playing ball. 

I'd never heard the name Van Gelder when I was a kid. I'd never been to Iowa until my parents drove me out and dropped me off at college. Somewhere in that bunch of Young Calvinist youth, freshmen in 1966, there was a drop-dead dark-haired beauty named Barbara, whose attention was focused elsewhere, as was mine back then. We spent four late '60s years in the same small college but barely knew each other, never dated, never even looked closely that I remember. Not that either of us weren't, you know, searching.

My sister played cupid, dragged me to Chicago to visit, told me that as long as I was here, I really should take out Barbara Van Gelder, who was teaching there, same school as my brother-in-law. This Barbara Van Gelder was available as far as my sister knew. "You really should take her out, Jim," she said. That kind of force.

She talked me into a weekend in Chicago, but the dating thing was plain ridiculous. 

A basketball game. I was sitting in the bleachers with my sister and her husband when this Barbara--"yeah, I knew her, but she went out with my roommate, Sis--how awkward is that"--when this Barbara Van Gelder, very much unattached, walked in all the way across the gym floor--orange sweater, clingy as I remember and will never forget. The ball game was going on, but I saw nothing else. Six months later, we were married.

So today, that little girl in her father's arms has spent 48 birthdays getting third-rate cards and not a whole lot else on this day, July 14, her birthday.

How many years old? I know I shouldn't show her age, but then she, sure as heck, doesn't. I'll say this much--she's finally my age. For a while. 

This morning, the woman I married is my morning thanks.