It's A Celebration!

I was a strange little boy. My favorite thing to do when I was six years old was count money and make lists of things I'd buy when I grew up. I imagined that I'd be rich and make about a thousand dollars a month. I used to break out my notebook paper and Mickey Mouse calculator and total up all of my future expenses. I was gonna live in a nice place so rent would be about $100 a month and my car note would be $50. I dedicated a whole $100 to my wife. Yep, back then I knew that I was gonna get married. In fact, I spent my whole childhood trying to perfect the craft of being a good husband.

I wanted to hit the ground running. I had a surplus of bad examples, and I said I'd be different. The funny thing is, it's hard trying to find a wife when you're under 18. Girls used to always tell me that I would make a good husband but a horrible boyfriend. That's code for, "you're too nice." I didn't see the point of treating girls like shit just to get them to like me. That reverse psychology thing was for kids and I was 17 going on 30. I decided to just pick an HBCU and meet a girl like the ones like I saw on A Different World. In fact that was my only motivation for going to college...find a wife.

I picked a school in the South because I heard southern women could cook and considering the AIDS rate in DC, I needed to go to a more wholesome place. Damn was I wrong. There were so many skeezers running around my school. I remember reading an article in the school newspaper my freshman year. We had the highest turnout for a blood drive in the school's history and yet they had to trash 60% of it because of STDs. Finding the woman I'd been El Debarging for all these years was gonna be difficult. (El Debarge= All This Love is Waiting for You...Love in a Special Way)

Anyway...I'd just gotten out of a relationship and had pretty much just decided to King Jaffe Joffer it up (sewing my royal oats) when I had a Prince Akeem moment. It's the corniest thing in the world, but I literally found myself lost in her eyes. They were like these big pools of mahogany and I couldn't stop staring at her. It was as if time itself had stopped and we were the only two people in the room. One long three hour phone conversation and I knew that I was gonna marry that girl. Three months later,

I had seriously been planning my entire marriage from the time I was six years old. I thought about gifts, I thought about spontaneity, I looked at all the failed marriages in the adults that I knew and I tried to imagine not the perfect woman, but the perfect woman for me. I have a shit load of flaws and I used to write em down and figure out what traits my wife would need to have in order to complement them. After fourteen years of that kind of thinking, you know the minute that you meet it. It doesn't take a whole day to recognize sunshine, so when I met my wife, I put a ring on that quick.

Nine years later, we're still together. I still feel complete and I still feel like I found the perfect complement to all of my flaws. And thirty years ago, today, she was born. So while she's probably somewhere dreading turning thirty like most women do, I'm ecstatic that the fates conspired to have her born at exactly the right place and right time so that all of the random coincidental events of our lives could push us in a seemingly random directions that would cause our paths to collide and bring to fruition every dream that I could have or will ever have.

In short (which I probably should have began with)...
Happy Birthday. Your presence is the greatest present I could ever receive.