AN OVERDUE SALUTE TO MY EDITOR DAUGHTER
Molly holds her son and my fourth grandson—our shared treasure—thirteen month-old Jamie Alejandro Geroux. Taken yesterday, her birthday.
What better time to celebrate the brains behind this blog than when Molly’s birthday and Mother’s Day abut? Yes, she’s been my editor, art director, photographer, and all-around IT staff for the last six years I’m pleased to say. Nepotism you’re thinking. Nope. She’s got her own credentials, beginning with inheriting the copy editing skills of her mother, Timarie, the best I’ve encountered in sixty years in this word business. In addition she graduated with honors in English from UC Berkeley and writes her own very literate blog, linked here.
There is another literary tie that binds us. For the first three months of Molly’s life, when my wife had to return to work, I stayed home and played “Mom” to her. Or tried to. I kept a diary of the experience that became my fifth book, My Summer with Molly, The Journal of a Second Generation Father, which won the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for Autobiography. It’s available for a free read here, (as are some others of my books, gathered here), if you are interested.
Mention of the book prompts me to exhume a poem I hurriedly wrote the day she entered our world, when I first witnessed the miracle of birth:
Molly, Dear
What a happy day in May
When little Molly Margaret
Came to us to stay,
Not trailing clouds of glory
But love to show the way.
Little Molly Margaret,
How trippingly off the tongue
Spring those words for this elfin girl
Whose time on earth has come.
I say her violet eyes
Are two of one of a kind,
And the smiles I give her now
She’ll one day repay in kind,
Molly dear, born this day,
Putty wonder from my clay,
Teach me to know anew
The human heart at play.
(5/13/86)
