Chocolate cake

He's about five foot nine, broad in the shoulder, with smiling, terrifyingly clear blue eyes. He keeps his hair short so that no one can grab him by the hair and slam his face into the wall or the floor or into their knee. Where he works, this is a consideration. He claims he's an ordinary, average guy, and sings the song with a sweet voice somewhat out of tune. Someday, when he starts feeling his age more he wants to be a curmudgeon, but for now he's just a brat and a warrior and a lover that romance writers invent but never believe are really real. When he travels alone, the cities sometimes seem the same because all he sees is the inside of a gym and a lot of sweaty men in workout clothes or in martial arts gear or in armor and uniforms. He trains for the things no one likes to think or worry about, keeps us safe, but blushes and denies it when someone tells him he's a hero. Tough luck, babe, you are a hero, though not the kind that rushes into a suicide charge. He's more interested in getting the job done. The bad guy in the cell, the friend back in the raft, the woman through the tight spot in the cave, the medical care to people who desperately need it.

It'd take a really long book to describe all the things he's survived and done and enjoys, and hardly anyone would believe it anyway. We've been married for fifteen years (egad!) and there's never been a dull moment, at least not for me. Despite being a fantastic father, provider, and mover of massively heavy things over long distances, he still asks me if I believe he's worthy of me.

So we had chocolate cake with his equally remarkable mother and the beloved Cajun family friend and cast sarcastic remarks around the table, laughing, grinning, wishing him happy birthday. A new oak tree shades the meadow below our house, his birthday present. Of course it was too heavy for me to manage on my own, so it was Rory, the birthday boy who had to drag it down on a heavy sled while I merely balanced it, Rory who dug the hole and rolled the tree in. I scraped fertile earth around the roots and watered it is about all. Rory dedicated it to a good friend of his in Montreal, a fellow warrior.

Tomorrow we leave early in the morning for Cape Cod. We'll watch silly movies on a portable DVD player and write and sleep if we can. No one around us will think there's anything much to notice about the handsome man just starting to go bald sitting next to me, unless they happen to meet his gaze. They'll see the strength then, the depth of intelligence and spirit, and wonder who that is.

That's Rory Miller, half Irishman, half myth. Well, I guess that makes him all myth. May the sun and stars smile upon him today.