The look in your mother’s eye

As we raced from the hotel

The headlights passing by

I remember it all so well

We were strangers in a strange place

Fragments of feelings stretched and torn

But we found an extra measure of His grace

On the night that you were born

August 9, 1981, a small package arrived at a hospital in Denver, Colorado. Anne Martin Fischer was born. She was six weeks early and anxious to get started. I’m convinced she chose to come while we were in Denver because she was hoping to get in some snowboarding right away, but she didn’t realize it was summer and most of the snow was gone. So that would have to wait about 18 years until she returned as a student to the University of Colorado at Boulder where she was to earn a degree in kinesiology on her way to becoming a trauma doctor in a hospital in Hawaii.

Getting a six-week start on her birth is indicative of Anne’s life; she’s gotten a six-week start on everything. She’s just a little ahead of everybody else. And sometimes that makes her a little impatient with others around her. Like the time she set the clocks up a couple hours and put double caffeine in her brother’s morning coffee so she could get him out to the slopes earlier.

It’s what puts her out in front of everyone else. In that way she is a Vanguard like her mother for whom I wrote the song:

She is walking into all situations

She is working hard

She’s a leader in a new generation

Vanguard

But such a position also comes with a price. There’s a cost to being in front.

Keeping all her fears down under

Against the flow

The price she pays is high no wonder

Only a few will know

People like Anne and Marti carry a certain amount of emotional baggage around. It’s the cost of taking risks, forging a path, going where no one has gone before. You don’t have to be born six weeks early to have this. Anyone can have it if they want it. But it didn’t hurt to have an early start. Happy Birthday, Anne.

So I happen to know that right now Birthday Girl is on her way to somewhere in the southern hemisphere where it’s winter and she can go snowboarding. So she can do what she couldn’t do in Colorado — snowboard for………’ her birthday in August!

The skydivers