I’m not a big numbers person, but . . .

12

on 12-12-12??

Come on! That’s serious business!

So serious that people were carrying out all kinds of crazy plans today: having babies, making babies (oops, sorry . . . but . . . probably), marrying, jumping out of airplanes, getting their ears pierced (eh, that one was a bit of a miss).

They were doing these big things in hopes that good luck and good fortune came -- hand in hand -- with any activities that happened to be bundled in with this once-in-a-lifetime triplet of numbers.

And while for us, today was actually a quadruplet of numbers (and almost a sextuplet -- I spent a good hour and a half pushing our boy into this world; had I completed the task a mere nine minutes sooner, Abe would have been born at 12:12) our good fortune didn’t come with something that happened today. We certainly celebrated our fortune today, but it came with what happened 12 whole years ago.

It came when Mike and I -- young and poor, new to marriage and new to life on our own -- left our tiny one bedroom apartment (the papers and books Mike had been studying for his final the next day left strewn across the floor; me bundled up tight in Mike’s Paraguayan poncho) to make our way – all nerves and pain, fear and excitement -- to the hospital where we would welcome our first small, helpless, freshly created, real live human into the world at large, and, more importantly, into our own tiny sphere – our little realm of love and life and knowing. Heaven knows how we dare to do something so tremendous. So big.

But we did dare, and he did come. And that tiny little parcel -- with the square mouth wide open and screaming and the shaky arms that terrified him if not kept tightly wrapped -- was absolutely, purely and perfectly, a bundle of good luck and good fortune.