I have a daughter, an only child and I have never told her that the most profound, incomparable and enduring moment of my life was when she came out into the world and opened her bright eyes and looked me in the eye, as I stood, mesmerized, speechless and in awe, as she came to life. What a moment in my life, what photo, what book could compare with that sense of miraculous wonder, especially after the  losses before her.

And so many years later, just a few days ago,  this weekend was her 30th birthday, and I was on my book tour and had been for a month and I forgot about it, and she called to tell me about the party she had had with her lover and her friends and I started to say of course I remembered, but happily,  and because I don’t lie anymore, to anyone, and instead said, “I’m sorry, I forgot,” and  said again that I was sorry that I had forgotten the birthday and she said she understood, and she did, sweet thing, but I could not explain to her what I felt, not guilt, because things happen, and guilt is pointless, but the way life works, and that we live far apart and are not much in the lives of one another, although we are very connected and very close. And that a 30th birthday is important, and of course I should have remembered it, because it is so much more important than a book tour.

And so failing to have words, I e-mailed her this poem by Wendell Berry, which I happened upon tonight, as I was sitting alone in the farmhouse reading. The poem is from “Leavings,” and it is the first one I came upon when I opened the book. And has that ever happened to you, friend, that when you open a book, something you need appears in front of you?

 

“How many of your birthdays

I have by now been

glad of! And all that time

I’ve been trying to tell you

how with you was born

my truest life and most

desired, the better man by your birth I am,

however fallen short. I’ll never get it right

by half.

Between us, by now, what

is more telling than the silence

in which once more an old

redbud simply blooms?”