Happy birthday to Trin, May 30, 2009!
Dear Trin,
This is the second birthday you’re celebrating during your long, seventy-two week treatment.
Your lively intelligence, unflagging determination, down-to-earth practicality and enduring strength set an example for me every day. A truer friend than you would be hard to find.
Come this Fourth of July, citizens of the U.S. and pilgrims from around the world will again ascend to the crown barred to us since September 11, 2001. I wish you and I could do that climb together.
We’d laboriously and breathlessly climb the narrow, rickety stairway within the hollow interior of the Statue of Liberty and gaze, like Liberty herself, beyond the ocean horizon.
“…Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles…
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus wrote this to Liberty in 1883.
Happy birthday to my steadfast pal, Trinity. I wish you liberty from HCV.
Port
P.S. Since your hemoglobin isn’t rock-bottom, I hope you can blow out your candles without help from the grandkids.