To My Man on His Birthday

My moon, my man, so changable and such a lovable lamb to me.
Today is your birthday. Your birthday, and I have in my mind all the things that I want for you, the things I can't afford but give you as mental gifts. I want to give you the world!
I think back on our honeymoon and how Juliette wanted us to watch her Moorea house for the summer, and how the bartender and his sister wanted to teach us to spearfish. I had just bought a sofa, I said. A Sofa. And so we didn't. But you had that nasty giardia thing, so I guess it was nice to come home back then, and we don't look back in regret. (But if someone out there is reading this and can watch a house in Moorea, leave the couch.)
And you work long hours as a carpenter now supporting our little family, and then you come home and bust out the red wine and we watch travel shows and live vicariously through Anthony Bourdain and sometimes Samantha Brown and whoever is going anywhere at that moment, really. We unshelf our dreams for an hour, talk rampantly about what we'd do if we could do, and then I look over and your head has crashed on the couch, but not that couch, that one didn't last. but we did. :)
So today I'm giving you what I'd give you if I was giving you something, other than a trip to eat Indian and the used bookstore. What I would do. If I could do. And I feel that eventually we can.
I give you a restored El Camino, maybe painted red, or orange, or even a 'mysteriously black' black, as I know that you eye them often. (Okay, the kids won't fit in it, so for now it would have to be a weekend car, but it's only a mental gift, so go with it). The CD player works like clockwork, as does your Pandora connection, so well you really don't need the cd player that much.
We'd go here and there like a crazy gypsy family, three months here, a year there, and we'd learn a new language and wear comfortable shoes. Bake bread, but wait, you gave up gluten, so we'd make rice pudding. with rosewater, like the Indians do, but with little strawberries on top, and we'd sell it in a rolling cart, like foreign street vendors, and people would think we were uneducated, but really it was because our language skills were in need of more time. We'd run cobblestone streets and paint buildings and eat like starving dogs in foreign countries where the food is good. The girls would love it too. And we'd trade the camino for a boat, and sail back to Moorea where we started this travel adventure together, but with the kids and lots of unopened booze, not because we enjoy drunk boating with children, but because the people on the islands told us the tiny cool places habitants like to trade black pearls for whiskey, so we'll trade and eat fresh fish cooked on a little portable grill while the girls string pearls on the beaches in the evenings. We'll learn to spearfish after all, you leaping off the boat in polynesian clarity, me with a lifejacket, or two, or three...but you won't drink the water. And maybe I can't give you these things right now, but maybe it'll come, and if it doesn't... you are still my greatest adventure.
(four months til Barcelona!) Happy Birthday to my lunar love :)