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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - August 17, 2007 A welcome story and a blessed event ...
We've been gone from the office for the past three days. Sometimes, the internet and all the research and interaction thereupon has to wait for nature here on earth to run its course. And the course this week has been the very accommodating birth of my granddaughter Reese. Somehow knowing that I had to be in LA next week for meetings and San Francisco the week after for the Bay Area UFO Conference, Reese decided that there was no sense in waiting until the end of the month or September, which would put her in a schedule conflict with her new cousin, also on the way. Thus, synching their calendars on their amniotic PDAs, and coordinating, of course, with an older brother, who was occupying himself with knights, dragons, and a very nice Junior Slinky®, Reese decided to be the early out, thereby staking her claim to the first summer birthday. The Amtrak has no scheduled run down the Northeast Corridor that early in the morning, and even if it did, Mommy, who usually picks us up at the station, was otherwise occupied with Reese, so we piled our duffels, a computer, and a PDA into the East Coast jalopy and headed south into the blackness of a false dawn. South, south we went, email already piling up, servers getting clogged, Blackberrys losing their signals, food-bearing eighteen-wheelers plowing down the passing lanes as if they were the only games in town. By the time we got to Philly, the sun was rising. And you could see the dawn West Coast flights catching the morning sun over Delaware Bay. And by the time we got to Baltimore, it was full daylight, and you could see the MARC trains off in the distance carrying D.C. commuters to Union Station. It was time for the eastern jog off to the shores of Chesapeake Bay where, already catching her first breaths in a new world, was tiny Reese, staking out her biological territory for the next hundred and twenty years -- or more -- depending upon any advances in cybernetic nanobiotechnology that Charles Ostmann can devise. Always amazing to contemplate looking at a little human who will ride the current of time into the next century. Who knows, I thought to myself as we burst into the birthing center room like the top executives of the a high-tech company in a Japanese cell phone commercial, we could be meeting the Nth female POTUS, stretching her lungs in her first stump speech. Proud grandparents can have these thoughts now in the twenty-first century. You know the digital press in 2068 will be having a field day parsing her press conference remarks into "Reese's Pieces." Enough about that, I have a confession to make. Not that I had any choice about it -- EVER -- but I was quietly suggesting the name Gracie, albeit already tooken by another cousin. And it was for purely selfish reasons, I must admit for the digital record. Because my godmother's name was Gracie and because I wanted the opportunity to say, over and over again my godfather's signature line on television, I was pushing for Gracie. I asked my son-in-law, "Look, how great would this be? Every night, sans cigar for politically correct and anticarcenogenic reasons, you can say the magic words: "Say goodnight, Gracie.'" Instead, and with great joy, we're very thrilled to say, "Good morning, Reese."
Bill Birnes |
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