The Twenty first of January

My #2 son, the Swordsman, turns twenty three today. 
He is a child of epic imagination and great courage.    From the first he showed a wonderful combination of determination, a strong sense of self and an epic sense of fashion that is unlike anyone elses.  His sense of adventure  made him somewhat hard to keep track of. I think he got lost everywhere he went including at the county fair.  The first sentence I taught him to say was "Me Jamey, me lost."
 Mercifully he didn't tend to disrobe, he always loved costume and so wore a self selected collection of clothing  intended to increase his sense of adventure.  It included a star spangled cape, boots, swim goggles, dishwashing gloves, black face paint, and a collection of batiked dragon t shirts. 
In the first grade, his teacher allowed him to wear the cape but after several incidents decided regretfully that his mask wasn't allowed to come to school.
James was a kid that really needed swords.  Any stick became one and he spent a lot of time jumping out of bushes after monsters, stick in hand and telling me about sword and  sorcery adventures that he made up as he went along.
In the fifth grade I set him in front of the keyboard of our first  constucted computer and suggested that he write out one of the storys he told me.  In an hour he cranked out a five page epic titled "The Voyge of Aartreu"  complete with car crash spelling that worked if you took a run at it.
James came with a sound effects track.  He hummed honked and hsshhed, binged and bonked in many tones constantly.  One of my quiet enjoyments was to listen to him in a tiled room with good acoustics.

When he was about fourteen, it became clear that he needed to learn how to really use a real sword.  We looked about and James found a martial arts class in sword, Iaido.
This is a picture with his friend David, and Nelson Sensei, his teacher.

I was concerned because I had seen too many people waving wooden swords around and I didn't want James to be one of them. 
He wasn't.  His teachers taught him the discipline and respect that using a weapon requires, including how to walk away from a fight.  I think he was sixteen when he began cross training in Aikido. There was a while when he attended Iaido on Sundays and Aikido on Thursdays, and I did not worry about him being bullied at school.

In this picture he is practicing sword cuts on a pumpkin.

James stopped training after he graduated from high school for a while.  He took some time to think about what he wanted and finally decided that he wanted to become a professional chef.

The same inner compass that steered him to Iaido and Aikido steered him to cooking school.  Cooking school took him to a big city and back to Aikido.

This is James, a Certified Chef, a title so new that is still squeaks when he turns around.

Now it is his birthday, and I am so pleased at how his determination and inner discipline have carried him so well and so far.  Happy birthday, James the swordsman.