Happy Birthday to Tony and to Earl. Canadian Thanksgiving is tomorrow but we are celebrating it today, since Katherine is heading back to Minnesota tomorrow and Tony actually has to work. So I am thinking alot about thanks and the two birthday dudes in our life.

I am loving and appreciating them both in new ways this year. I see Melinda grow happier and more settled and I am grateful for Earl in her life. But that is not all I am thankful for… Earl brings verve to our lives. He has broadened our horizon … but he has brought us new ways to worship and that is a special blessing in my life. I remember worship in that little chapel in  Homestead… I had my eyes closed as I sang, and I heard this voice of an angel, a strong angel next to me… I looked and saw it was Earl… that was a moment of comfort…

okay so this is what i wrote last night as cheesecake baked, and sisters marinated turkeys, and Tony replaced guitar strings….  and then this morning I read Melinda’s post…  and it is all true… read her post… we love him, we do…   so it is time for a birthday story… I don’t have any baby Earl stories so I share my earliest memory of him…  Melinda was attending the University of Miami, but she and I thought together that Calvary Chapel Ft Lauderdale’s Bible college would round out her education…  a professor of mine from trinity was teaching there also and she had her first class with him… but before the class began there was the convocation… on the drive up there, I joked, “who knows maybe you will meet your future husband there?” semi-joked…

once there…  the men line up on one side of the tiny Chapel where the ceremony took place,,, the women on the other… I happened to be sitting right next to the men… I looked at the line up and saw really only one possibility… I cant remember what eliminated the others… either they were way too old, married… I cant remember, but there was only one “possibility.” I made this observation as a joke in my head… I didn’t really think he was the one… it was a side thought because of the joke in the car… on the way home, I mentioned it again… well there was only one possibility for the future husband… I could not even remember what he looked like at this point…  (trust me if I had really thought she was going to meet him there, I would have taken a picture.")

but my driven daughter began to pester me.. what was he wearing, what colour was his hair, his eyes, did he have long hair, was  he the fourth one in, the third one? did he look towards the speaker? the questions went on for about three weeks… until we finally settled that even if he wasn’t the one, there was a really cute guy in her class with Dr Beatty who brought her “nutter butter “ cookies every class, placing the snack pack on her desk before she arrived…

Earl, Happy Birthday, love Mom

And my other birthday dude… my Tony, who sleeps right now…  I am thinking of our last nights in Florida… the a/c had broken, we were packing up a house to move to another country… we had children sleeping on every available square inch of the cramped and disordered house… and I was dying in the heat, married a few days… he drove out in the night, to find a store he thought might be there and bought me a fan… I didn’t know he had gone, I had been drifting in and out of sleep and he bought the fan and set it up, carefully detecting the best place to make me the coolest…

I have changed his life, turned it upside down, made it much noisier, more rambunctious, less private, filled it with pot lucks and social events and into the places not filled with noise and people, I have packed in impossible logic…

Friday, we watched the Twins game on our bed, Katherine in her TV position between us (it is like athletic American idol with her, the drama, the agony, the ecstasy … mucho emotion) and the Fiorito boys scattered in between, walking, crawling (little Chip was next to Tony and his bag of chips, getting leftovers) Finn was walking from place to place on the bed, manuevering over people and legs… and Grandpa Tony was worried he would get hurt (a flash of the future, “careful you’ll die”… a family reminder of how much Tony loves us,) Carson was lounging against me eating chocolate and chips… I laughed to myself… I am not sure this was Tony’s vision of life, but he was having fun … it was a priceless moment… a treasure stored up in my heart..

I am writing a Christmas play for church and casually mentioned  how nice a song or two from him would enhance the production… without telling me .. he has written a song…

the other night when half of Thunder Bay sat in darkness because of vandals at the power sub–station… he and I lay in the dark and he told me stories of arriving in Morocco and the food, the smells, the tastes.. he picked out the details he knew would make it alive for me… better than any Law and Order show *winks* and I see  my life has a rich texture…

most of you will never know him, he is quiet, reserved… but he is passionately devoted to these kids…. he has been a “behind the scenes hero” in their lives and in ways most of them will never know this side of eternity, he chooses honour and courage, we are having about a million more pounds of food today than we really need, but he indulges my love for overstatement…

I love you my Tony… Happy Birthday

I love both of you, Earl and Tony… you both challenge me to think more, love harder, worship God more passionately…  happy thanksgiving to me…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 7:28 am and is filed under Birthdays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.