Birthdays

“Whenever you would have a tonic for your spirits, consider the good qualities of your companions, for example, the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of yet another, and some other quality of another; for nothing cheers the heart as much as the images of excellence reflected in the character of our companions, all brought before us as fully as possible. Therefore, keep these images ready at hand.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Fall arrived in the Southern Tier yesterday after lunch, with brisk winds sweeping away the drizzly gray and replacing it with crisp air and spectacular color.

Was there ever a more beautiful afternoon?

Of course, I had to experience it through a photo P took when she came home from work early, as I slogged through a Zoom hearing and attorney phone conference. We finally made it onto the porch for a pre-prandial, until the chill wind drove us back into the house. Magical stuff.

This morning I was struck by the coincidence of the birthdays of two folks who have been a treasured part of my life for a long time now.

I first met PT when he was in about the sixth grade, one of a posse of young men who ran around the neighborhood with my Jim. PT was the shrimp of the group--hard to believe now that he's a good two inches taller than me, and stood out from the others because even then he seemed determined to excel even though his domestic circumstances would've given him ample excuse to settle into a more pedestrian existence. He was a star baseball player until he broke his arm and his family couldn't afford to have it fixed properly. He did well enough in high school for admission to whatever college he chose, but possessed limited means to get there.

But Jim was determined to start the college journey with his best friend, so I took the two of them on a meander to visit colleges across the South--UGA, Sewanee, and finally New College, which they decided would be a great fit despite the fact that it's sort of a hippie college and neither of them seemed to qualify as hippies.

Jim had the hair for it, at least when they first arrived. Here's him and PT as high school seniors, after spending all night in the parking lot of a newly-opened Krystal Burger in Panama City for the reward of some sort of Krystal Burger For Life voucher.

Soon Jim cut his hair and became the campus contrarian in his madras plaid shorts and polo shirts, while PT really took to the place and the culture. They joined the sailing team together, and spent their first couple autumns traveling the South getting trounced by more focused sailing teams while wearing their signature New College $5 disposable shades.

No school that claims as its mascot the empty set, as in

and proclaims itself on t-shirts as "still undefeated" because it's never had a football team, can take itself very seriously.

Over the last couple years at NCF, PT and Jim sort of drifted apart. PT was working, delivering pizzas at night while trying to nurse a beat-up Volkswagen Jetta across the finish line to graduation, and starting to get involved in politics, first working on a local state senate campaign as I recall. He applied for a Fulbright Scholarship at graduation, and when he was passed over decided to stay in Sarasota and work as a mortgage broker to support himself until he could reapply, In his "spare time" he helped manage Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign there on the lower Gulf Coast.

And on his second try he got the Fulbright, went to Germany, and managed to stay and obtain a master's degree in Freiburg, with the classes taught in German. Somewhere along the way he attracted the attention of the folks at the U.N. and began work for them as a staffer on climate change issues until he was hired by an NGO that works closely with the U.N. researching and teaching on those topics.

Have you read a press release from the U.N. Climate Change Taskforce lately on things like carbon emissions and sea level rise? There's a good chance PT helped write it.

Along the way it seems he managed to fall in love, a surprise to me given his apparent satisfaction at being a peregrinating bachelor. A few months ago I attended his wedding to the lovely Tanvi in Copenhagen via Zoom, a sea of mostly Indian faces onscreen with my pasty mug and that of his father in California providing a little diversity. PT and Tanvi are getting married again in a formal Indian ceremony in what used to be called Bangalore, her hometown. Peg seems really determined to find a way for us to be there, which touches me more than I can say. We're all family.

Yes, I'm proud of PT and the small role I got to play in his amazing Horatio Alger story, although I wish he'd relax and take himself a little less seriously. I guess it's the age--in some ways I was the same way back then, until life taught me it's about more than filling a CV with achievements, and you're going to get knocked down hard eventually. But that day hasn't arrived yet for Patrick Bon Tonissen, who turns thirty today and apparently has big plans for his birthday weekend touring Niagara Falls with Tanvi.

Today is also the birthday of my old, dear friend Tom.

I had to think back this morning at three a.m. or so, trying to remember when we first met. It finally came back to me that our paths first crossed when he and Linda returned to his beloved Panama City after he retired from the pulpit down the road in Apalachicola, and the two of them were instrumental in acquiring what became the campus of Holy Nativity Episcopal School. The parish at that time had unfortunately come under the spell of a messianic rector with a Captain Queeg-like paranoia about dissenters in his midst (he once preached a sermon staring at me and telling the packed house that certain folks among them were agents of Satan sowing dissent among God's people. I should've gotten a copy and framed that one). As soon as Tom and his group of benefactors arranged for the acquisition and renovation of the old Cove School, the rector started taking steps to wrest control away from the school board, fire the beloved headmistress and replace her with one of his toadies. I had a bar card and managed to get involved, even meeting with the lawyer for the diocese when it started to appear that a lawsuit was just over the horizon. Ultimately we worked it out, the raging rector imploded and ended up pastoring some roadside evangelical church up near Birmingham, and Holy Nativity got a first rate campus and a first rate administration to manage it.

And Tom and I got to be good friends, this most unusual of Episcopal priests--a former officer in the Tin Can Navy, Vietnam veteran, college professor, self-taught Greek scholar and connoisseur of good wine. And mullet. I never quite got the whole mullet thing, but then again I didn't grow up running barefoot up and down the docks in front of my father's fish house in St. Andrews. Sometimes food is desirable as much for the taste as the time and place it evokes.

Later Tom mentored a very busy Education for Ministry program at Holy Nativity, and convinced me to join. Then he suggested I'd be a pretty good mentor myself, and I happily made my way up to Sewanee for a weekend of training and hiking in the woods.

Then I started wrestling with that "call" thing, convinced I needed to do more than just teach and handle the chalice at Sunday Eucharist. If you've been down that road, you know it's one of the most fraught and emotionally wrenching experiences one may encounter. Tom and I talked and laughed and prayed and drank a glass of wine in his office every few days as I navigated all that, culminating in Tom standing and delivering the sermon at my ordination as a priest a couple years later.

Which, looking back, was probably a failure of discernment on my part, because in the midst of all that came Peggy, the greatest gift God ever brought into my life although the church didn't much see it that way. Tom was always patient and kind as I tumbled through a sort of love I'd never experienced before, offering sometimes good advice and sometimes not-so-good. That's life, and that's what a good mentor does. Tom helped me reframe that crisis and come out the other side with Peg, me, and the Mother Church happier and better off.

And last summer P and I righted something that had bothered us for months. You see, Tom was also a friend of Peg's, her pastor during those same turbulent times, and the two of us always hoped he'd marry us one day. But we were overcome by events, got married in Mom's living room on the eve of a major surgery for her, and that most special day was spent without him.

That is, until we reached out to see if he'd be amenable to blessing our marriage there in the very spot where it all began, on the patio of the still-unfinished condo in Panama City, on Peg's late father's birthday. He agreed, to our delight, and had me pick the scripture. We selected Song of Songs, of course. It was a beautiful moment in a beautiful spot, a moment of redemption for all of us.

All ended well, for all of us, bathed in God's presence and God's love.

Now we visit whenever I'm in town, email regularly, and otherwise keep up with each other via our two blogs. Tom represents what I hope to be in my later years, still intellectually precocious and engaged in life at, what is it now Tom, 86? My own father sits in front of the television all day seething at the liberal media and his own infirmity at 82. Tom's the walking embodiment of a better way, just as PT represents what could have been in my life if I'd had the stones back then to do it.

But no complaints. It's a spectacular day here in a verdant, rolling place, and I don't have anything on the agenda when P gets home but to spend a little time with her.

Happy birthday, guys. Look forward to seeing you both soon.