Here's to You, Kid

It’s my boy's birthday today and didn’t we have fun when you were small, Mike, like that one time we used Magic Markers to make a big scary face on my styrofoam wig-head, then lashed it to the closed and upended ironing board so its base became its shoulders, then dressed the whole monster up in my big old bathrobe and propped it up so it was sort of leaning in over Dad’s sleeping form? When you called Dad’s name and he startled awake to see this hideously smiling ‘thing’ staring into his eyes, the look on his face was priceless. In our minds he deserved the shock  for presuming to be sound asleep on a Friday night at 7 when the rest of us were celebrating the start of  the weekend.Now here we are at the start of another weekend some 15 years later and God  knows what kind of crazy fun you’ll be getting into tonight with your pals down there in Brooklyn.... So this is just to say here’s to you, boy of my heart; you whose oldest sister once called  Our Best Final Project, even though you did bite her square on the bottom the summer you were four.So, readers of mine, this is Michael when he was little being given the ET-in-the-closet treatment by his sister Annie when he was little. And here underneath is his big sister Carrie looking over at her own new baby  a few summers back. Maybe someday, when Mike looks over at a baby of his own in someone's arms he might finally come to know how much we all loved him.