Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.

~Vincent Van Gogh

It’s a year and a half ago, on my birthday, and Daisy hands me a box.  It’s rectangle, about the size of a coffee table book.  

I look at the box, pick it up, and measure it against possible matches in my head.  

It can’t be what I think it is.  That’s impossible.

I open the box.

GASP!  

It’s beautiful.

I pet, then remove the gift from its shell.  I place it in my lap.

“We have to return it,” I say.

My heart skips a beat as I speak.  I can tell that Daisy’s has done the same.  

“We can’t afford it.”  I repeat the message in different words, just in case they had fallen out in the wrong order the first time.

Daisy looks at me, silent.  I know that she wants me to be excited.  I can feel her desire to see me jump up and down, and break into a garish smile.  She wants to hear me shouting in glee.

“I have to return it.” My voice is almost a whisper.

Daisy then uses a word said less often between us than the word flabbergasted.  ”No,” she says.  ”You deserve this.”  She takes my hand and places it on top of the gift.

I run my fingers across the lid and then I lift the screen.  Twenty-six letters stare at me from three neat rows.

“We can’t afford it.”

“We can’t afford not to.”  

This is my logic she is using.  Flawed, of course, but I’m listening.

“Go on.”

“Your brain needs to be busy.  This will take you anywhere you want to go.  Please don’t fight me.”  Her sentences are short.  She doesn’t want to argue.  Neither do I.

“Write a book, make a million,” she adds.  She does not say this then with the certainty that she will nine months later, but the seed is planted.  What she means in that moment is that I can do anything I want to and, dollar for dollar, she just handed me the finest tool in the world.

After a brief exchange where I was reminded whose retirement was cashed out (Daisy’s) to buy the house, and who decided how to spend every penny (Writer Dad), I conceded.  It’s eighteen months later, and I am thrilled to report, Daisy was right.  

If I paid two dollars every day from that day until now, the Macbook would be paid for.  That’s less than a cup of coffee.

Today is our anniversary, a perfect time to acknowledge the amazing person who brought us all together.  

Daisy and I have been married for seven years, holding hands for eleven.  It’s a bit of time, but compared to my grandparents who were married for three quarters of a century, it’s really just the first few buds to bloom on the branches of a freshly planted tree.  

In that full year plus a decade, Daisy has never doubted me.  Whenever a crazy idea tumbles from my mind, her first question is always,

“What can we do to make it happen?”  

Most recently, when I said that I thought it was time for us to write full time and take a machete to life’s jungle, she bought fifty spiral notebooks from Target at ten cents each and piled them around every room of our house.  ”Don’t let your ideas get away,” she said, kissing me on the mouth.  ”You’re brilliant.”

Pertinent facts – Writer Dad: 7th grade kind of cool, 8th grade really cool, 9th grade total nerd.  Junior year, argument with guidance counselor.  Academic files grow fuzzy after that.

Pertinent facts – Daisy: Master teacher with a specialty in early childhood education.  Multiple recipient of the Teacher of the Year Award.  Has taught on four continents and helped to design curriculum.

Daisy is my biggest cheerleader.  She believes in me with a certainty that could only be described as spiritual. She is always downcast when she believes I’m bored, but I’ve never seen her happier.  This is in large part because, with no less than 1,342 projects swallowing our horizon, my brain has never been this busy.

Thank you Daisy, for conversations that flow like a decade worth of running water.  Thank you for being a tireless mother to our exhausting children.

Parenting well is often rewarding, usually fun, and rarely easy.  Doing it with you is like dribbling a ball.  

Our future has never been more pregnant and, as scary as it might be, there is no one on this Earth I’d rather hold hands with as we jump into the unknown.

Happy anniversary.  I love you.

Writer Dad

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