The main difference between living

in Canada and the US is that in Canada,

you get to listen to people bitch about the US less.

Point: It’s Easter Sunday. Do you know why it’s Easter Sunday, how they pick the date? I’ll tell you.

Passover has always, like always, been observed on Nisan 14. Nisan 14 is the date when the first full moon occurs after the Spring Equinox, and it has been used to keep with the lunar connections of the old Jewish calanders.

Now, if you go read something like John 19:14 , you will note that Christ was crucified on or just before Passover, during preparations for it (there are contentions as to whether it was actually Passover or not, and I haven’t had enough coffee to get into those details.) You really don’t need to follow that link, though. Everyone knows about the Last Supper.

Do you believe in fate?

We met so randomly, the way you meet a hundred people a day. Your path somehow crossed my path, and there is no reason at all that it should have been more than that. You could have been a guest, or the UPS guy, but you weren’t.

I paused, for just a moment. You paused, too.

I have known you for so long now that if I don’t think really hard about, I lose track of the years.

This thing that we have, this place we have come to, bears the sweat and the toil of a garden in rocks. We have never been easy, or quiet, or reasonable. There are so many points at which we should have stopped and walked away, and yet, here we are, our lives so hopelessly intertwined that we couldn’t leave now if we wanted to.

You are the antithesis of me. You go left where I go right. You R & B, I Hip Hop. We have almost no common thread between us, at least on the surface, and we like it that way. What we will almost never admit to each other is that underneath the library and the iPod and the wardrobe, we are mirrors of each other. We believe the same way and trust the same way and fear the same way. We grew up in different universes, yet ended up adults with the same values and priorities and beliefs.

Sometimes I am left to wonder why you fight this thing, this us, as fervently as you do. And then I stop and think about it, and I am left to wonder why I push this thing, this us, as hard as I do. The answer I have come up with is that you don’t push and I don’t pull nearly as hard as we think we do. We were brought together; by biology, by electricity, by chance or by fate, by something that doesn’t matter anymore. We were meant for this, this right here, right now, and it is beyond us. We struggle to force definition to it and to mold it and shape it, but we are helpless against it.

We, being the thinkers, being logical by nature, have difficulty accepting that.

Wanna know a secret? I totally accept it.

I look at these children, and this family, and how it has evolved and grown and become a force to be reckoned with. I look at the branches that have sprung from the roots of a chance encounter a life-time ago, and how many lives have changed because we each found the courage to say a small something to a stranger.

I believe in fate these days. I cannot deny what has come to pass between us, and through every hardship, and all the sorrow, and the doubts and the fears, I know that it is worth it. I know that for every down there are so many ups, so many quiet, subtle, perfect moments between us. They say the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. You came into my life and brought to it what are the very best parts of me. I know that your spark, that bit of electricity that fuels each human, passed from you to me one day and left a bit of itself behind so that it could find it’s way back. You are forever part of me. And that is an honor I hope to truly deserve one day.

We, you and I, we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

It’s true….

Happy Valentine’s Day.

1of3 was completely absorbed in being 17 and swimming in the big pool by himself. How time flies.

My point is this. I put enough sunscreen on us to cause a small eclipse. This time, I remembered myself. (I usually don’t.) And my sweet children, who used the exact bottle of sunscreen as me, still have beautiful, glowing, healthy skin. I however, look a good deal like the American flag, if you factor in the starry-blue eyes. I put sunscreen on my face that was 1 1/2 times stronger than that on my shoulders, and it looks like I have a lobster firmly affixed to my forehead. My legs, however, had not one drop of sunscreen and sat hovering over a kiddie pool for hours and are still almost transparent.

Maybe fat blocks sunrays.

And so, on the Fourth of July, I took one for the team. I am a walking, talking, red and white striped illegal alien. ‘Cause me & my skin? We’re patriots.