By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–My birthday: Before the sun even came up, I adjusted the cold seats in my stepdaughter’s sporty red Volkswagen GTI and went out to fill the car with gasoline. Ran it through the car wash, too, while trying to comprehend the audio graffiti they call music that comes out of the speakers. She’s almost 18, truly a good soul, trembling with excitement and trepidation about the colleges—a great young citizen of society with a will of her own. The world would be wise to prepare for Samantha.
I called my 15 year-old stepson Austin, an auburn-haired boy of uncommon kindness, to stir him up from sleep. It was first light, and my two children at home needed to get going for school. The young man, who looks like a long drink of water with a smiling countenance, was already figuring out how to get into the same space with his willowy girlfriend today. He is so in love that it has required him to actually calibrate life beyond his usual umbilical relationship with his deific IPhone, which he understands better than I do the Talmud.
My oldest daughter Sari, thirty years of age, oval-faced and vegan-slim, is also in the house, though she resides in New York City. Circumstances have brought her to California exactly when I was to have been in New York celebrating my birthday with my wife and soul mate, Audrey—who is, much to my interim disappointment—in the Big Apple and soon to convene with her national business colleagues. As I stirred in the kitchen, quietly helping to organize my stepchildren’s breakfast and lunch arrangements, Sari murmured a tender “Happy Birthday, Dad,” to me from her slumber position in the adjacent living room and I remembered the day she was born, wiping a tear of happiness.
Meanwhile, Debra, the indomitable 27 year-old, the writer with pinwheel eyes and a crushingly funny Broadway sense of humor, was texting me good wishes from New York. (I’m allowed on my birthday, a day of awkward self-absorption, to mention that Debra works for the freakin’ New York Times, okay?). Debra will be connecting later in the week with in New York with Audrey for drinks, while I continue to run the carpool culture that is the transcript of this decidedly edifying domestic re-run of a movie I’ve been in before.
Audrey sent a romantic message via text before 5 AM; I was already awake in the bed that is bereft of her fragrant and delicious presence and responded with a bit of a cyber-sonnet. She called: “What are you doing up so early, my love?” I thought: planning menus, kid. But what I said and what I mean is, “Missing you.”
“I know. I love you, darling.”
It’s not even 7 AM and I already got all the gifts a man requires.
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Kamin is a San Diego-based freelance writer