Happy Birthday at 39

My nephew, a November baby, is older now than I could ever have imagined becoming then. At 23, I held him, a warm lump of sweet 6-month-old baby looseness. As the first of the two grandchildren in my small nuclear family, he was and is well loved.

If I look closely at this black-and-white, I can see the smears of what his mother called "cowboy cakes" (Little Debbie oatmeal cakes) across his mouth, chin, cheeks, and flexible nose that he could (and still can) smoosh nearly flat into his face.

My sister-in-law, dead now too young, and my brother gave me a gift I cannot measure: they asked me to be Davies' godmother. In the Episcopal tradition, he has only one, although he has two godfathers -- one Episcopal and the other, my oldest brother, Catholic at the time. Me? I was and still am nothing. But the parents wanted me anyway, and the priest didn't care.

In December 1969, our small family -- Williamses, Hoods, Andersons, and Chenoweths -- gathered around the font at St Luke's, the church which my parents helped to found, and all read the parts of the christening service which we believed and remained silent for those we didn't -- a truly inclusive service welcoming Davies into the family of man.

Today, he enjoys his own nuclear family -- wife and two daughters, one of whom has the same face (smushy nose and all) and body and personality that I knew then.

He may be a strong man now, but to me he'll always remain somewhere in my heart the boy who wanted to become a cowboy artist, who screamed "yo-yo!" and shook as if electricity flowed through his body when someone offered him yogurt, whose head was so large his mother had to slit the necks of his pullover shirts, who used to spin and spin with his white-blond hair flying out as if he were standing at an electricity ball, who held my thumbs when he saw a puppet show that scared him, who once bent over a scurry of ants to prevent a friend from smashing them, whose warm lump of flesh felt so good in my lap that June day in 1970 when we floated along in The Painted Lady.

To him, happy birthday, always, with love.