2025 Life Logs, Day 97: Happy 16th Birthday to Ziggy Milo Handley
Date: Monday, April 7, 2025
Weather: Drizzle On and Off All Day and Evening; High Temp 47, Low 38 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Sixteen years ago today, a star was born. During the month of February and March, 2009, Mark and I were living in a tiny apartment in the Boat Lagoon in Phuket, Thailand. Windbird was on the hard getting a ‘facelift’ but we could see her from our tiny apartment balcony. We spent those two months falling in love with life in Thailand and overseeing the work being done on our beloved sailboat, which was also our home. We needed that work to be completed by early April because Justin and Jo were expecting their first child the middle of April and we wanted to be home for the birth. Heather and Jed were also expecting, but not until June. Our plan was to sail Windbird back to Rebak Marina in Malaysia and fly home to the US in mid-April, stay for a month, and then get to Cape Cod for the birth of another grandchild. Our plan was to be in Sante Fe, New Mexico, for Ziggy’s birth, but he decided differently. He decided to arrive a couple of weeks early. On this day, April 7, 16 years ago, just as we were dropping the lines to leave the Boat Lagoon for Malaysia where we would leave Windbird to fly home, Mark was checking for email one last time before losing our internet connection. There was an email from Justin and Jo saying that Jo’s labor had started. The message said that her water broke two days prior and that they had sent emails but didn’t hear back from us. Somehow, we never got those emails. We tried to call them while we still had land cell service, but they didn’t answer. We called our daughter Heather and found she had also received the emails and would forward them to us. We were literally drifting away from the dock while all of this was happening. But we knew we had to go ahead and leave so we wouldn’t miss our flights out of Malaysia in just a few days. As we sailed south, we heard nothing the next day. We changed our sail plan to stop at an island the following day where we knew we would have phone service. We arrived and rushed to land to try and contact Justin and Jo. We were successful and found that we had a grandson named Ziggy Milo Handley. He had a tough time getting into this world, but both mother and baby were fine. It was a moment of great relief after two days of anguish not knowing what was happening. We celebrated that evening by sending a Chinese lantern into the starry, starry night sky and cried tears of joy that our little ‘star’ was born. This is long, round about story of Ziggy’s birth, but a necessary story to explain while he will always be my shining star. Happy 16th Birthday to Ziggy Milo Handley.
I am at Heather and Jed’s tonight, waiting for Jed to get home from Town Meeting. As I said last night, Heather is in Boston and Jed is a voting Town Meeting member. I have been checking Falmouth cable television during the evening to see how things are going. Town Meeting is set for two nights each spring, but sometimes everything can get done in very long night. From what I have seen tonight, it will be two nights this year. And if so, they will probably close tonight’s meeting around 11 pm. Everyone here is asleep now, so I could go home. I’ll end this, check the tv one more time, and make my decision.
