Liam is a Teenager!!

Who'd have thought, when we were serving Eggplant Salad with Corn, that this rotund blue-eyed marvel of a baby boy would ever worry about fixing his hair to go on a date?

Be surrounded by beautiful young women and love every minute of it?

Suffer his older sister's ministrations with good humor?

Work his dad's necktie like an old hand?

Then go to a homecoming dance? 

 photo by Cameron Hupp

Some say time marches on...well, we know that time RUNS.

 One minute he's sitting on the living room carpet in diapers and an ocean of wooden train tracks, and the next you look across the table at Miller's and your father looks back at you.

 "I'm a pie man myself." Ack! It's Dad, down to the shirt!

He's wearing--and swiftly growing out of--my hiking boots.

He keeps everyone hanging on his next word. You never know what he'll say or do, but it's bound to be hilarious. Hog Island, Maine. 

Watch out. He'll bomb you.

You'll pick up your brand new iPhone and there he'll be.

Open your computer and there he is. Messing around with you.

Always, always making you laugh helplessly.

with his beloved sister never far away.

Rites of passage await around every corner these days. Catching his first fish, a mackerel in Maine...

giving Mom a thumb's up as he powers up a hill

and taking her breath away as he surges by, whittled down to muscle, bones, beauty and resolve.

And I remember wishing he'd grow out of loving his trains so we could walk through our own living room. Please, take the big bridge outside and build it. Next to the willow we planted the year you were born. Right there. If you drop your trains into the flowerbed you have to go get them, Liam.

 Oh, be careful what you wish for.

Happy birthday, magical boy. Please stay around awhile.