One of the things about approaching my 70th birthday is that there are certain things about the passage of time that surprise me. Sometimes it seems like time is passing so quickly. Today is our son’s 42nd birthday. It hardly seems possible that our children could be middle-aged. It seems so recently that they were babies. How did 42 years go by so quickly? There are some ways in which my memory isn’t as reliable as it once was, but I remember his birth very clearly. At the time, I didn’t have any memories that were 42 years old. I hadn’t lived long enough to collect them. Since he was born, I’ve stacked up a huge pile of memories about his life. In addition, I’ve been collecting other memories along the way as well.

His son, our oldest grandson, is 12. He’s almost a teenager, and he certainly has the personality of a middle-schooler. When I spend time with him, there’s no mistaking that he has grown and changed a lot since he was born. Being with either of them, or both of them together is a delight for me. They are intelligent, fascinating human beings and I am always learning new things when I am around them. There is no small amount of pride when I see what they are doing and how they are contributing to their community.

There are time that pass more slowly. There were parts of waiting for our son’s birth that seemed to take a long time. The labor before his delivery was especially long for his mother. In the early stages of labor we stayed at home, monitored what was going on, played games, and waited. I knew fairly early in the evening that I wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. I suppose that I dozed a bit in a chair at the hospital that night, but I don’t remember that part of it at all. It was just after noon the following day when he emerged into the world, had his umbilical cord cut, and was wrapped in warm blankets for us to hold him for the first time.

This last Monday, I watched as the forms were constructed for the walls of the largest infrastructure project in the history of the town where our son works. The multi-million dollar project is, in many ways, his. Of course nothing of such a large scale is accomplished by a single individual, but the Mount Vernon Library Commons project has been one of the main focuses of his work for the past 5 years. He has learned the intricacies of city politics, mastered complex funding and financing strategies. Written huge grants that were successfully awarded, developed media campaigns and mastered Internet and social media arenas. He has learned about architecture, structural engineering, bidding, and construction. And all of this has taken place while he has administered a city library with a staff and an expanding arena of services, developed a plan for a family farm, kept livestock, and provided and cared for a growing family.

I couldn’t be more proud.

As I watched multiple cranes working on the project, I marveled at how our lives have brought us to this point. The years have passed quickly for us. We’ve done a fair amount of moving since that North Dakota Sunday - the Ides of March, 1981.

Last night I was doing a bit of sorting in the fireproof box where we store important documents. In the process I ran across copies of our wills and the living powers of attorney for health care decision that we drafted. In my memory those documents are relatively new and fresh. However, the dates on them show that they were executed in December of 2007. How quickly those 15 and a half years have flown. It was July of 2007 when I published my first journal entry on the Internet. I’ve adhered to the discipline of writing an essay every day without missing a single day since. I started publishing them as an experiment. I don’t think I ever thought I’d keep up the daily routine for even a year and now it is a part of my life. I’ve no inclination to stop writing and publishing my journal entries, but it is probably time for us to re-visit and revise our wills. After all, we no longer live in the same state where those documents were executed. And our circumstances have changed considerably.

I suppose that the birthdays of children are always opportunities for parents to reflect on the passage of time. We watch as they learn to roll over and stand and walk, we witness their first words and first days of school. We marvel at their emergence into adulthood. Every day of being a parent is a day of witnessing a miracle. I know that our son and daughter are both capable of presenting us with surprises and new things to learn even though they have become adults and in some ways settled in their lives and families. Watching them never ceases to be fascinating and amazing to me. A birthday is certainly cause for celebration. And now, I have a collection of 42 years of birthday celebration memories, making today an especially rich time to pause and reflect.

The soothsayer’s warning to Caesar, from Shakespeare’s famous play titled with the emperor’s name, has become a bit of a family joke for us. “Beware the Ides of March,” is not an ominous warning of a revolt and the nefarious planning of a crowd out of control. It is, rather, the reminder that each year a date important to us comes around. It was the date that our marriage partnership turned into a family. It was a day of new and wonderful beginnings for us. “Beware!” might not be the best word to express how we feel about the day. “Behold!” might be a far more appropriate term for this day.