Good food, favorite vacations, friends, the White Sox.
But our daughter, Danni, who is getting married today … Well, she is something-else special.
• • •
It might not have started out that way. If you picked up the papers on Oct. 20, 1987 — the day Danni was born — you would have seen this headline:
Black Monday.
That’s because a few hours before Danni came into this world, the stock market nearly left this world.
On that one day, it lost nearly 23 percent of its value. No other single day in history — not the Great Depression in the 1930s nor the Great Recession in 2008 — even came close.
Welcome to the world, Sweetie.
But bumps in the road didn’t change how special Danni was. Life was good. She was here with us.
Born in Fort Myers, Fla., Danni would begin a journey that not many children would experience. She traded her roots for adventure.
Most of you reading this likely have lived within spitting distance of where you were born. Not Danni. She was always on the move.
She was still in diapers when we left Florida and headed to Binghamton, N.Y., an old, established town with gorgeous fall colors.
There were early signs of brilliance in the birthplace of IBM, and a budding gymnastics career.
From there, it was off to Santa Monica, Calif., where she went to school with the rich and famous and traded her back handsprings for a talent agent.
What, doesn’t everybody have one?
But with the L.A. lights glistening just to the east, we felt it wasn’t the ideal place to raise her. So it was off to Vancouver, where she would grow into who she is today.
She excelled at being special at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics — singing, dancing, acting, learning math stuff like the Cardinality of the Continuum. Hey, look it up.
All that learnin’ landed her a place at one of the more special universities in the country: Northwestern.
Then it was off to Atlanta, then to the University of Georgia School of Law. She passed the Florida bar exam and started working as an attorney at the public defender’s office in Miami.
Along the way she became a Chicago White Sox fan, made national news when she wrote a blog for us describing how she survived a summer in Vancouver on one tank of gas … and fell in love.
This love thing really is special. Oh, she’s had boyfriends. But Steven Solowsky — the man of her dreams, whom she met at law school — topped them all.
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I knew he was the one when I found out my favorite Christmas song, “Dominick The Italian Christmas Donkey,” was his favorite Christmas song! Bella.
• • •
So sometime today, I will walk our beautiful daughter down the aisle. It will be 77 degrees, and the warm waters of Key Biscayne will be only a few feet away.
She’ll be looking at me now because I’ll be giving the father-of-the-bride speech. She’ll be looking at me but thinking of Steven.
Me? I’ll be thinking of the first time I brought her to Comiskey Park as a tiny girl to see those White Sox. I’ll be thinking about when she snuggled in behind me on the couch while we were watching a scary movie. I’ll be thinking about when she went off to a college that was too far away for me.
And I’ll be thinking of how I just gave away the most special thing that I’ve ever had in my life.
Every move Maley and I took, every decision we ever made, we did for Danni.
Please take good care of her, Steven. And remember …
“Ci no ne un poco pazzo, non puo entare nella casa mia.”
Hey, look it up.
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