February Eighth
There was a boy
A very strange, enchanted boy
It must be the time of year. I got blindsided the other day at Safeway again, heading out the door with pork chops and potato chips when I heard her behind me and to the left.
"Would you like to buy, um, some candy?"
A Campfire Girl this time, all of 6, I'd guess, sitting at a little table, surrounded by peanut brittle, hands folded neatly the way teacher likes it. The candy was five dollars and I only had three ones, which I handed over as a donation, a word this luminous creature didn't understand but her mom did and I would have given her my car keys and the deed to my house. She already had my heart. I lost to little girls a long time ago. Big girls, too. I admit my powerlessness. No higher power has saved me, and none will. I will be a sentimental fool the rest of my damn life.
And then, last night, I had a dream. A woman I knew a long time ago, I dated, 25 years in the past or more, held out a baby to me and said, "It's yours." Even in my dream I was doing the math and stammering. I don't know nuthin about birthin' no babies, Miss Scarlett. Still. It was a baby.
And, of course, it makes sense now.
He talked to me of many things
The Soviet Union was crumbling. Mike Tyson had lost his first fight, to Buster Douglas. And I was skinny as all get out.
This was mostly frustration, 1990 style. I hated the work I was doing, hated that it was boring, hated that I had to do it on an IBM Selectric and not one of those PC things, hated that it meant working, even at home, in the middle of the night because that's when it was available. So I drove into Seattle in the early hours, dropped off reports, then came home and ran.
I ran like a rabbit. I circled the lake, circled it as many times as it took, until the endorphins kicked in and I could finally relax, have maybe a glass of beer and then crawl into bed, prepared to crawl out at noon.
It sucked. But I was skinny.
I hauled my skinny butt out of bed that afternoon, February 8, 1990, and got a phone call. Julie, her mom, and Beth were out adventuring, traveling to the future, first to the doctor and then to the mall to walk. They say walking helps. Maybe sex does, too, or hanging your head out the window in a fast car. There are lots of theories.
But life started leaking out, the stuff of preparation, the amniotic fluid that sustains and nurtures our futures while they get ready, so I headed for the hospital. Beth, all of five but still aware of her surroundings, gave my mother-in-law directions to get home while I sat in the labor room, watching "On Golden Pond" with Julie, sensing it would be another long night. I mean, my kids always were ready, but they tended to have to be really ready.
You old poop! You are my knight in shining armor, mister, and don't you forget it!
Hank and Kate saw us through, then some sorry PBS documentaries that drew my attention away in the early hours until Julie snapped her fingers to draw it back.
I AM IN SOME MAJOR PAIN, JERK, HOLD MY HAND AND TELL ME TO BREATHE AND STOP WATCHING THE DAMN RUSSIAN BEAUTY PAGEANT
I took him to Disneyland when he was seven, just the two of us. He slept on the bus from the airport, slept eight hours every night, but the rest of the time we hardly stopped to eat. We did Splash Mountain, as I recall, 14 times.
I was trying to crush a milk carton, a gallon plastic bottle, and it wasn't working so I jumped on it with both feet, slipped and fell on my ass. He held his stomach, he was laughing so hard. He was 2.
He hugged total strangers. Once he hugged a park ranger, at the age of 10. This was embarrassing, to me, but a boy who doesn't read body language well learned that certain people of certain ages like hugs, and he liked to please. "I love everybody," he once told a somewhat cynical neighbor, an ex-cop, and what I think now is that there is a special place in heaven for people who can say that with a straight face.
There have been trials, and bad days, and money spent and doctors seen and books read. But, as Hank Hill likes to say, I tell you what.
My teenaged son likes to hug me every day. You got something like that?
You're lying.
He comes home from school, dragging or (recently) skipping, overjoyed that he's now in high school and taking interesting classes and doing creative writing and learning to draw, and still he will hug me if I give him half a chance.
I used to sing to him in his crib. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." It had his name in the title. I don't know, it was just a lullaby, but I would wait, sometimes, years later, at 2pm in the afternoon, wait for the bus to stop, listen for the footsteps, knowing my Johnny was marching home again from a difficult day, and...I dunno. I hummed. It just made me smile. Plus, I got the hug.
I get so irritated at him, particularly when he yells at his mother. He does that, you know, yells at her and calls her names, none of them nice. He has no clue what words mean, mostly. He uses "ironic" and "logic" in very strange, uh, illogical and ironic ways, so he can say some mean things and not mean them.
And then, after a bit, he hugs her and apologizes.
You got that?
He will never be normal. He rejoices in this proposition, that all men are not created equal. He feels blessed, if discomfited.
comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable they used to say in church.
He stands 6'2, now towering over my 72 inches, but I can see him at 10, still. We go to the beach. We hop over rivlets. We scrape up sand. We climb over rocks. He wades into the water, amazed that his movements create ripples.
Oh boy you don't know. You just don't know. You have touched every person who ever knew you. Talk about your ripples.
He didn't even know it was his birthday tomorrow, by the way. We had to remind him. You got that?
Julie and I always sort of believed our children already had names. Sorry. That sounds sort of New Agey, but that's the way it was. We just had to find them, figure them out. Like "Where's Waldo?" the names were hiding in the clutter. But we did OK.
"Beth" popped out of the maze early and we recognized it immediately. We gave her "Alana" for a middle name, but honestly we got that from a book.
But John took a while. And then, we were sitting there toward the end of gestation, watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when one of us (I can't remember which and I'm not about to guess, not today) said, "What about Jean-Luc?"
We mulled this over for a bit, but we understood that names travel, that there are a lot of calendar pages to cover, and having a name like "Jean-Luc" might prove less than interesting for an American boy in an American school.
Then one of us (and I swear it was me, I'm almost certain) said, "How about John? With Luke as a middle name? Some good old-fashioned Gospel names?"
well I wasn't necessarily thinking about the Gospels, I was mostly watching Star Trek but maybe I can get extra credit
So he became what he is. John. Luke. Sigars.
My parents were moving that day, February 9, 1990, as it turned out. I gave them a head's up but still. It was a long night. And John arrived before dawn, and immediately I called them and got my mom, already up and ready for the trek (get it?) and said we had a boy, his name was John Luke, he was healthy and alive and screaming his head off. I can still see this. Like it was yesterday.
There have been a lot of yesterdays, relatively speaking, and I can see most of them, but mostly that one. It was a Friday morning, just before daybreak. The nurse evaluated him, gave him apgars of 9 and 9, and then handed him over to me, maybe saying "It's yours" but then I knew that, I knew he was, I know he is. 
8:51:33 PM 
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