Happy Birthday, Julie Kae
Do you remember the Land of the Not-Yets, Beth?
It was a story I made up for you when you were a little girl, when you’d gotten weary of Disney but not Daddy. The Not-Yets were pre-life, little diaphanous bubbles of laughter who could fly without fairy dust, and they waited to be born.
And there was one particular Not-Yet, of course, and she called herself “Beth,” even though Not-Yets didn’t have names. Yet. You see.
But this little Not-Yet, who had red hair even though she really didn’t have hair, was a ball of heavenly attitude and she knew exactly who she was going to be. And when it came time for the Not-Yets to have their one visit to earth before their births, a free ticket to anywhere they wanted, and most of them chose either Disney World or Las Vegas (hey, I was making this up as I went), Beth was unique.
“I want to go to Flagstaff, Arizona,” she said, firmly (how else), “in the early summer of 1982, to a restaurant called…”
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Black Bart’s was and is a steakhouse, a long bungalow of a building with a sheet metal roof, half a mile or so east of old Route 66, bordering the interstate and the focal point of an RV park. This is where I met my wife. And my future, and fate and stuff.
During the winter the waiters, almost all music majors from Northern Arizona University, would serve up porterhouses and buckets of beans and the house specialty, deep-fried ice cream, and in between they’d sing for their supper. Show tunes, mostly, standards and the occasional Sinatra number.
I owned the Sinatra material when I was there, by the way. Owned it.
In the summer, though, there would also be dinner theater, skits and group numbers, one-liners and a real old-fashioned melodrama. People in the RV park loved this, and the cast members were a select eight who got a little extra pay over the break.
It was just a job for me, and I needed a job. I was fairly tall and not bad looking and I could sing, after a fashion, a deep enough baritone to round out the barbershop quartet as a bass of sorts, so they ignored my dancing and hired me and I got to stay in school another year.
They never asked me if I could read music.
Oh, I could in a way. I could identify notes and I could fake around on the guitar and piano, but I couldn’t sight read worth a damn and I was a theater major to boot. I’d eventually learn my vocal parts by having my wife-to-be pound them out on the piano into a tape recorder, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
Music rehearsals were important for me, then. My first was on a Saturday, an early morning in the early summer. I sat at a table in the dining room, drinking a free Coke and trying to remember all the words to my first song, which, as it turns out, was “Try To Remember.”
My memories can get a little cinematic. They have some ambition. So I can’t say for certain that the door opened, and sunlight flushed through and backlit her and I saw a silhouette. I can’t really say that. But I knew her.
I knew her, I thought, and almost called her by another name before I realized she was a stranger. But I knew her.
It was recognition of a kind, I know, but it confused me to no end. It seemed natural to see her, the way you find a friend in a crowd, but I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me and still in some way…go figure. I saw something. I felt something, and it was natural and right.
It would take months, seriously, months before anything remotely romantic happened. It was just a moment. The way she swung in gracefully, all Dallas diphthongs and slim and beautiful with big glasses on. But I knew something, and it would take me years to figure out what.
I thought about this a lot, over the years, and one day I sat in our living room and ruminated and Beth called for me. She was 4 or 5 and had just taught herself to stand on her head. This was a big deal, a milestone to a preschooler, and as I sat there and wandered around the past she called me.
“Dad! Come watch!”
And I put two and two together.
I don’t do this all that often…
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…and of course the red-haired Not-Yet is assigned some other place, Bangkok or South Dakota or somewhere, and she squeezes her imaginary eyes and prays a Not-Yet prayer and the numbers change and the sign says “Enter Now” and there is a frustrated, totally pissed-off cry and everyone smiles in the delivery room.
“This is a term baby,” the pediatrician says, because there has been some debate about dates, and I turn to run and grab my video camera and a nurse says, “Have you thought about a name?” and we both say, in unison, “Her name is Beth” and there you have a story, go to sleep now little girl. You win, you won, you always have…
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…I don’t apologize enough, or tell her I love her, or even point out her flaws and gloat. A lot of the time, I don’t do anything.
But I remember.
I remember lots of things. I remember the way the sky looked that first winter in the Northwest, that aqua that came from the Sound and rushed away at 5 o’clock to dark. I remember seeing “The Big Chill” and “Risky Business” that winter.
I remember labor rooms and bank officers and basements and lawns that hadn’t grown yet. I remember preschool and middle school and high school, and voting booths and anniversaries and parties when I had too much to drink. I remember four weddings and a funeral and all in between, and I remember you.
I remember what you wore and what I felt. I remember everything that was and everything that came to be, and I remember you.
I loved the accent, and the hair and the body, and the arrogance that put me in my place because you were smarter than I was and you were better. I would tweak this a bit over the years, point out the discrepancies, but you held the best hand, the full house.
There are echoes that bounce around time and space. They keep us humble, things we can’t possibly understand but know to be true anyway. They remind us that we are pipsqueaks in Creation.
I remember you. I saw you for the first time that day, and somehow at that moment I heard my children calling me. 
8:01:31 AM 
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