I am quite interested in history, but I am not really big on nostalgia. I am fascinated by the moments when big changes occurred in the past. Certain inventions, such as the printing press, coincide with dramatic departures from the way things previously were. I enjoy reading about innovators who came up with ideas that we take for granted. But I have no desire for history to go backward. I don’t buy the arguments that things are getting worse. I have little patience for those who want to re-interpret the past in order to make a particular political point in the present.

History truly is written by the winners. What we know about the history of the place where we live, for example, is the story told from the perspective of the settlers and soldiers and not the version of the story known to the indigenous people and their survivors. One of the things that I appreciate about certain historians is their passion for the truth. It isn’t all that difficult to find errors and outright lies in textbooks and other materials that purport to tell history. Sarah Vowell is one of my favorite historical writers. Like James Loewen, she tells true stories that aren’t reported in history books and corrects things that others got wrong. Vowell does this with an incredible sense of humor and a passion that engages her readers.

Today’s blog, however, isn’t about our collective history. It is more about my personal history. It is a story that I have told in the blog before, but one that bears repeating, because it contains depth upon depth of meaning for me. I keep returning to my memories for clues about the nature of life. I am still learning from an experience that I had nearly 30 years ago.

As you start up the stairs to the two upper bedrooms in our house, there is a frame with individual pictures of our children as preschoolers. Along with the pictures are papers they made in preschool, with their handprints and a poem. There are several different versions of the poem. The ones on our wall read:

My Hands
“Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small,
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
But everyday I’m growing.
I’ll be grown up someday.
And all these tiny handprints
Will simply fade away.
So here’s a final handprint
Just so you can recall,
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.

I suppose it is mostly nostalgia, but I really like the objects in that frame. It is more than the notion of handprints. I actually liked the handprints and face prints our children left behind. I loved living in a house with little children. I don’t remember being discouraged by their messiness.

But I remember studying those tiny hands. I could look at them with absolute fascination for hours on end.

We went from one child to two children about as quickly as it can be done. There was a phone call one day. We had a baby, just less than a month old the next day. We stopped at the store to pick up diapers, bottles and formula on the way home from picking her up. She wasn’t the world’s best sleeper. My theory was that since she stayed in the hospital a bit longer than usual and because she was healthy, the nurses enjoyed holding her and playing with her and that they had more time in the middle of the night than they did in the day. I really don’t know that part of the story. I do know that she didn’t sleep through the night very many times in the first five years of her life. She remained talented at helping her father lose sleep well into her teenage and young twenties as well, but that is a different story.

But I was too excited to sleep that first night. As she lay in her crib, with her brother and mother asleep, I just sat by the crib and stared at her.

Her mother and I had taken our time with our courting. We may have married young by today’s standards, but it was not a rushed event or a commitment undertaken lightly. It took a long time from our first meeting before we moved on to dating. It took a lot of conversations to get to know one another. Our first child was about as well-planned as they come. We’d been married for eight years when he was born. We had anticipated and studied and prepared as well as we knew how.

So I didn’t believe in love at first sight. I thought that love required preparation and study and really getting to know another person. I was skeptical of those who said that they knew that they were in love the instant they saw the object of their love.

But when the social worker handed that baby to me, it was definitely love at first sight. I was so nervous about the whole procedure that I had to force my hands to stop shaking so I could receive that little bundle of pink blankets. But when I pulled the blanket back and gazed into the face looking up at me I knew for certain that I would never not love that little girl. It turns out that my initial reaction was absolutely right. I’ve been absolutely in love from that moment.

She has, of course, grown up. And today is another one of her birthdays. Like other responsible adults, she’ll soon be getting up and preparing to go to work. She lives almost 800 miles way with her husband in their own home as it should be. But I don’t really need the pictures on the wall or the poem to remind me of her presence in our home and in our lives. I didn’t even look at the frame at the bottom of the stairs to write this blog. It lives inside me along with a host of other memories. The anniversary of her birth will always be a holy day for me, even though I wasn’t even in the same state as her on that day. I hadn’t yet met her.

I know the story and the story is enough to convince me that love is at the core of this universe. We live to love. And God is love.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.