My Lucky Day

In the early morning darkness, a six-year-old boy slept peacefully in Apartment 12 at 239 Capitol Street in Ogden, Utah. It was December 15, 1952, a chilly morning in the mid-20s, a foggy night, the air heavily laden with the scent and murk of coal furnaces working throughout the smallish town. The midnight steam whistle in the nearby railyard was just an echo now…the town was largely silent. The boy may have been dreaming of the coming day’s adventures. There was always something interesting to do, some unintentional mischief to be done in and around the hulking 100-year-old apartment building that was the center of the boy’s life. It was the year We All Liked Ike, who had just been elected the first Republican president in 20 years, but the boy didn’t care much about all that. He just liked the campaign buttons everyone wore and the sound of the slogan “We All Like Ike.”

While visions of the next day and the rapidly approaching Christmas danced in his dreams, something was happening just a few city blocks away that would define the boy’s life, and make it possible for him to say so many times and with such deep conviction, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” At Dee Memorial Hospital on 24^th St. and Harrison Blvd., a young mother was giving birth to her fifth child, a tiny blond and blue-eyed little girl who would be named Deborah.

Twenty-two years later, as the world turned, the strands of our lives crossed in the unlikeliest concurrence of events. The rest is our history. Over the next fifty years, we have made a world together. By any measure, I’ve lived a charmed life, but no day of it has been as significant as December 15, 1952. It was the day my later happiness was assured, the day I will forever know as My Lucky Day.

Happy birthday to you my sweet darling. I love you, dear girl.