Remember Love...

...to my beautiful wife.

Don't know if you'll read this but I wanted to tell you on your special day:

I know I drive you crazy sometimes and that sometimes you think I'm your 6th child (well, I am just a big kid) but I want to make sure you know this...

...I love you.

I loved you the first moment I saw you and every day I love you more. Every day I thank God you're in my life. I've always been honored and very proud to say you're my wife and a little puzzled that someone as wonderful and beautiful as you would want to spend her life with a 'beast' like me.

Many men have wives that want to take and want to be put on pedestals and worshiped and have gifts laid at their feet. With you it's always been the opposite. You never want recognition for anything you do. You never want anything for yourself. All you do is give...to me, to your children, to everyone you meet. You give your time, your love, everything you have, your very life itself.

Sometimes you drive me crazy because you won't let me give to you. Well, today you'll have to listen and accept a little praise and adoration, no matter how much you don't like it. Remember these words? They still mean as much now as they did when we first heard them:

For all my life and forever
There's a truth I'll always know
When my world divides and shatters
Your love is where I'll go.

You have been my strength and the one here on earth that I looked to as an anchor in rough times. If I didn't have you I don't know how I would have survived.
I am your prisoner...

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Always remember...I love you

Happy Birthday!