Vati

How long since I've written that name. Or spoken it.

I travel back today, my father's 80th birthday, to Mexico when, at 40, at his last decade mark, he went alone from Guanajato where we were staying for the summer, to Moreilia to load our blue VW bus with furniture - strapped leather benches for us to sit in and chairs with big, black brads in which we, still little, and for the forgotten autumn afterward, remembered back to mexico, the cathedrals and clouds, the donkeys and firework trees, the handmade boots and the hilarious bad back roads he taught us to always take. Not much to that story - I just remember him saying that on a birthday one should take a journey on one's own for one's family. And how he looked, turning at the corner and how I worried for him alone on his way. Then to me, oldish, like a father just is but now than I am older than that myself...oh, my, so young, really and with so little road left.

And today then. A little journey back through that long, long tunnel of time to your Birdsy. I think I'll go see you now.

How the world needs your eyes.
Even more than I do.

I am still half you though.
And right now, still nine, with the lights of Guanajato just beginning to sparkle in a deepening twighlight and my whole, beautiful life ahead of me.

Thank you.
Vati.
my Vati.
Happy Birthday to You.