J.M. Barrie and

Each night has found either June or myself reading chapters from J.M. Barrie's original version of Peter Pan, and it's just about the most fun a person can have with paper, ink and a nightlight...a properly placed accent helps too.  Tonight, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 5, Barrie chucks out the word "pluperfect
" as though a swooning, humble twenty-first century fan might just grasp it as quickly as any common noun.  Surely nineteenth century readers had a better grasp on what are now the more obscure words in the English language but even still...pluperfect?  Brilliant.  My heart fluttered as Zoey began to snore, and I read another ten minutes despite her soft sleeping sighs.  Pluperfect. Awesome.
In the half darkness of Zoey's crowded room (a toy cleansing is in order this week) I closed the book, and lingered.  Lucky.  In love, and nearly incapable of imagining how I ever got here.  Before her I was a man who had thought he knew something about love and commitment...about sacrifice and giving.  Bam...pluperfect.  I was wrong.

Here, on the very edge of another Christmas, this one dawning on a house full of four beating hearts rather than three, or even two, I'm reminded by the most mundane, and random of things, as to just how blessed I am.  Beyond blessed.  In the strictest latin plus quam perfectum, my life is past perfect...so much more than perfect.  I enjoyed a birthday that passed with my most favorite of people.  I've spent two days in receipt of the kindest and most thought provoking sentiments following a rant that I only intended to quiet the awful noise.  I've slept warmly beside a girl I found friendship with first, then family.  I gently worked my way through a weekend of rest and muted excitement...just nine more days 'til Christmas and you can fell the soft thrill.  I have a job and an all-consuming purpose within it.  I am alive and still capable of incomprehensible passion and curiosity.  I laugh loudly, too loudly, and have earned and shaped a common sense that just ten years ago I might have thought impossible...tempered, thankfully, with a near ridiculous, often times obscenely unfettered sense of humor.  Everything is funny...or nearly everything.  I am comfortable and not yet fat.  My daughters smile at me, and my mind is still capable of outrageous adventure.

Plus quam perfectum...more than perfect.  Pluperfect.