Thirty-six years ago this morning was the happiest dawning of my life.  Matt, a miracle, our first son, was born a few weeks before our fifth wedding anniversary.

We had moved across the country and back again, hoping and praying to start a family.

On an orange juice-fresh sunny spring morning just outside of Los Angeles, Matt blinked awake, drank in his surroundings and happily concluded on Day One this was where he wanted to spend his life.

The remarkable strength of character Matt has doggedly developed over the intervening 432 months has been a beacon for our lives.

At the young and tender age of 9, he not only survived but conquered one of the rockiest divorces imaginable.

He was told his father was not his father.

A quiet but engaging conversationalist, he necessarily learned in his budding, then blossoming, years when to speak out and when to noiselessly observe.

Unlike his chatty parents, he is as reflective, introspective and rhetorically effective as he was during his early childhood and his growing-up years.

This enviable trait serves him masterfully today in his carefully carved world of art and technological design.

Gifted with hushingly honed freelance musical talents, especially as a pianist, Matt provided his stepmother Diane with some of her richest entertainment moments during her final illness.

In the summer after his bar mitzvah, through no fault of his, he was pitched into crisis that would have broken many boys. Matt’s singular strength of character, then in the construction stage, prevailed. It elevated him above a contrary crowd.

The 447-day experience helped mold him into the shining young man he is.

Hardly welcome, I came alone to his bar mitzvah and sat in the final row. Stealthily he came over, and we visited.

By his youngest brother’s bar mitzvah, I had remarried.

Little else, however, had changed in family relations.

My new wife was so upset by the treatment we had been subjected to that she ran from the synagogue.

This was the environment Matt grew up in.

With persistence, nurturing and silent observations that he shrewdly applied, he grew to tower over many of his peers, my ideal son, Matt.