That Birthday...and the Rest to Come

When I turned 21, my father gave me a book for my birthday. I did not consider this a disappointing present. On the contrary, I was delighted. The book was a handsome, thumb indexed thesaurus...Roget's, in fact, a St. Martin's Press edition of the original, classic, gold standard of thesauri, "completely revised and modernized" with American spelling and usage. It was a treasury of words, the key for saying anything that needed to be said, an utterly breathtaking compilation of possibilities.

And if you knew my father, you would have seen what a fitting choice this was. He possessed an ornate, incongruous eloquence forged from a bilingual background, hard streets, and sad stories, and an innate sense of poetry that no one could have taught him. He knew that language was a kind of wealth and power, and he understood that even the subtle shadings, sounds, and connotations of words contributed to their meanings and effects.

Although the tough realities of life had rendered many of his aspirations unattainable, he always comported himself with dignity and pride and spoke like a learned man. Knowing what to say and how to say it served him well.He wanted his children to have this skill. On many nights, tired from work and still wearing his paint-freckled overalls, he would sit and help me with my homework compositions. He showed me how a sentence could become more satisfying if it followed its idea all the way through. He reminded me to end each essay with a flourish, and to take the time to choose the right word for the thought. He valued good writing as a weapon and an art.

From his perspective, and my own, a thesaurus was a generous, well considered gift to give a daughter as she started out in life.

But he also wrote a message, a gift within the gift:

No word or phrase contained herein can give fair measure of the love and wishes for this birthday and the rest to come.

Because my dad was scrupulous with language and said what he meant, I am forever comforted by that phrase the rest to come. It means his wishes for me are current, and his love will never expire.

Unequivocally. Indubitably. Decidedly. Absolutely. Unreservedly.

It's an annual birthday message to me from my father, and no word in that thesaurus can give full measure of how much this means to me.