Daughter’s birthday today. Her 35th. A milestone of sorts. The fact she has been on the planet for three-point-five decades seems a significant chunk of life worth celebrating.

Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: “Your children come through you, but not from you.” My Katie couldn’t be a clearer example. She is very much her own person. For that quality alone, I am delighted by her and having her on the planet. She is a little like me, as genetics inevitably dictate, but mostly she is like herself.

Day by day, Katie discovers with more certainty who she really is. And what she really believes. And what she really wants. Those are not automatic givens for anyone. A lot of people flop around in life without much internal structure and an ill-defined self-image.

Katie was literally a miracle starting from the circumstances of her conception. She outwitted the murderous intentions of an IUD to be born on the planet. As miraculous to me anyway, she was a VBAC birth. That is, she was born vaginally after her brother’s C-section two years earlier. That birth protocol was rare back in the day. And she topped off all of the other improbabilities by being born on her grandmother’s birthday. Talk about a suck-up.

As a toddler, Katie shimmered. In her christening pictures, she looks sweet and angelic in a white floor-length lace and ribbon confection of a dress. I believe that sweet, angelic, and loving spirit she exuded that day is who she is at core.

Me and Katie did not have a particularly normal day-to-day parent-child experience, but we did have some adventures. I flew to Paris with her during a school break to get her to Austria where she would au pair for several weeks as a summer nanny. We rented a car at D’Orly Airport. As I haltingly made my way into Parisian traffic, I remember being hyper-vigilant about driving in Europe for the very first time.

It was Katie who spied a traffic sign directing us toward Versailles Palace. The playground of King Louis XIV and his court should have been on our list of must-sees. With no set itinerary, Katie and I were happy to stop and wander for a few hours through the luxurious palace and its gardens. https://en.chateauversailles.fr/

On another occasion, I flew from Ottawa, Canada and she from Christchurch, New Zealand to meet up in Los Angeles for the last post-Oscars taping of the Oprah show at the Kodak Theater in 2011.

Most memorable, beyond seeing Oprah live, was a major earthquake in Christchurch that occurred the very day Katie was supposed to fly to LA. With communications out of NZ badly damaged, it took hours before I learned she had safely boarded her flight and was on her way to Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrBA5ddfMc

One cold winter morning, we headed East in my new-to-me RVR SUV to drive across North America starting in Calgary, Alberta. We headed straight south into Montana and drove across the northern United States until we hit Long Island. Surprisingly, road conditions were summer-like for most of the way until we hit Iowa when a snowstorm hit us right between the headlights.

On another of Katie’s birthdays, we stayed at a dude ranch in BC and rode horses through a thick, tall forest. From the forest’s edge, we watched black bears gamboling at a distance in a large open field.

On one of my special birthdays, we climbed Seongsan Ilchubong Mountain on Jeju Island in South Korea. Had Katie not been there, quietly but firmly pushing me upwards on the treacherously steep trail to that peak, I m not sure I would have made it to the top. Which was so worth seeing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seongsan_Ilchulbong

A few days later, Katie and I flew to Hong Kong so I could visit her workplace. The best description for the place is rustic. Right beside the floor mattress I was directed to sleep on, a baby pit viper was coiled up in a clear Rubbermaid container with a top riddled with breathing holes. That it was really incapable of inflicting serious harm on a human was slight comfort. I put in a rather fitful night.

In the intervening years until she bore down on her academic pursuits, Katie amassed an impressive resume of international travel from New Zealand, to Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Yukon Territory and the Arctic Circle. Always with a job and with a goal in mind.

She graduated from the University of British Columbia two years ago with a degree in geography. She now applies that training to her job in a technology startup doing infrastructure assessment projects for engineering firms. In the past year, she has bought a house, is at work on several entrepreneurial ideas, and manages her household and business affairs well.

I am so damned proud of her. And happy for her though she isn’t always happy herself. She is a learning machine. She is saucy, sharp, fun, super-bright, fashion-forward, and athletic and she never quits when the going gets rough. She is logical and a problem-solver. I’m not sure that she yet fully knows how important those qualities will be to her in the future.

I sure hope she knows how vitally important she is to me. And to a buncha other people. Her older brother, for instance, who is a going concern in his own right.

Happy Birthday, BBH! (Have I finally made up for your screwed-up twelfth birthday? Surely an amnesty is in order what with a special birthday coming up for me, too. Think about it? :-))