(Grand-) Child of Mine--Happy Birthday Robby!

Tomorrow is my grandson Robby Kleppel's 4th birthday. I can't tell you how much I love him! Robby is so smart, so much fun--an energetic intellectual and emotional and physical whirlwind. In some ways I think of him as my own son--maybe that's the way grandparents always feel. His mother (my daughter Julia) and his father (Ed Kleppel) have done such a marvelous job raising him. And I guess Robby should himself get some credit for raising his parents--and grandparents.

Robby is full of so many wonderful enthusiasms. He loves his family, he loves his uke and guitar, he loves his grandparents, he loves his trains and trucks, his diggers and excavators (and he is quick to point out--a "digger" is not necessarily an "excavator"). And Robby is amazingly smart. Not yet four, he is deft and precise with language. And his brain is like a sponge (just like his older brother Colin and his baby sister Ava).

It has been such a blessing to be a grandparent to Robby, Colin, Ava--and now, Baby Lillian. I am so full of gratitude and wonder.

Here is a song by the folksinger Bill Staines that expresses some of what I feel about Robby, the day before his fourth birthday:

Robby with his new "Gorny Pig," Mr. Smiles.

Winter Solstice--A Poem

A poem for the darkness and cold, where Hope is a distant memory, a distant hope. Of course you've never felt like this!

Winter Solstice

The chill creeps into the bones:
December 21 and sun gone long before 5 o’clock;
huge gray clouds roll in off Lake Erie
riding the Witch’s gale, spitting sleet and

fears as real and as organized as the swirl
of pin oak leaves down Lakeshore Boulevard.
This day, shaken by nameless fears,
seems to last forever:

I wonder how I will get through the next minute,
and the minute after that,
and the minute after that,

wonder if I can make it
until hope returns

until peace-which-surpasses-understanding,
as mysterious as winter solstice’s fear--
my heart standing still, turning cold,
my spirit abandoned--

until peace returns like grace like unexpected

gift.

                Bob Coughlin