Son
What, who, where am I and why, how did I get here? It’s Joe’s birthday, he’s 54 today, lives happily in North Carolina, we usually see him twice a year when he comes down, Christmas and a summer visit. Anyone who has a little son: love, appreciate, enjoy and be thankful for him. His season of childhood is a few short years and he will be grown and on his own and never look back, though you will. To say it one more time again, not mawkishly but with the vision of hindsight, at this age I appreciate that “a child is a person who passes through your life on the way to becoming an adult.” Adults is what we are born to be, grownups, and we do not belong to anyone but self.
Self and, perhaps, Creator. If we let it be.
This morning every year I remember that 1960 evening in Jacksonville, Florida. The doctor had just shown me my newborn son. It was the day and age when the father was extraneous, no holding the baby, no getting too close, no visiting the newborn’s mother. Thus dismissed, I stood outside Baptist Hospital looking across the St. John’s River, mesmerized by the Shell Oil sign on the opposite bank.
Years.
Forbidden to go with them, so anonymous in my Navy overcoat and staying half a block behind, I follow Joe and his sister around our Chula Vista neighborhood as they trick or treat. At some point they spot a tall, dark figure following them and stop. “That’s Daddy,” I hear Joe assure Malinda. I try to make it home before then and deny it. Next morning, USS TRIPOLI departs for the nine month WestPac and the Vietnam War with me aboard. November 1, 1969, most miserable day of my life, even to this day.
Well, leaving Tass at her college in Virginia.
A little boy every night at supper crying for his daddy. Months later, returning home from WestPac, getting out of the car and seeing him spot me, come running and jump, leap, nearly knocking me down, and cling, cling. Holding on for dear life.
Years.
Buying him a red VW convertible, a car of my dreams even though he wanted neither red nor a convertible. But he drove it. To college, and then off to Las Vegas to be with his girlfriend, and then into the Army, living into that truth, “a child is a person who passes through your life on the way to becoming an adult.”
Years.
Dianne. Nicholas. Patty.
Jody. Joe.
That’s my boy.
T+ in +Time
Self and, perhaps, Creator. If we let it be.
This morning every year I remember that 1960 evening in Jacksonville, Florida. The doctor had just shown me my newborn son. It was the day and age when the father was extraneous, no holding the baby, no getting too close, no visiting the newborn’s mother. Thus dismissed, I stood outside Baptist Hospital looking across the St. John’s River, mesmerized by the Shell Oil sign on the opposite bank.
Years.
Forbidden to go with them, so anonymous in my Navy overcoat and staying half a block behind, I follow Joe and his sister around our Chula Vista neighborhood as they trick or treat. At some point they spot a tall, dark figure following them and stop. “That’s Daddy,” I hear Joe assure Malinda. I try to make it home before then and deny it. Next morning, USS TRIPOLI departs for the nine month WestPac and the Vietnam War with me aboard. November 1, 1969, most miserable day of my life, even to this day.
Well, leaving Tass at her college in Virginia.
A little boy every night at supper crying for his daddy. Months later, returning home from WestPac, getting out of the car and seeing him spot me, come running and jump, leap, nearly knocking me down, and cling, cling. Holding on for dear life.
Years.
Buying him a red VW convertible, a car of my dreams even though he wanted neither red nor a convertible. But he drove it. To college, and then off to Las Vegas to be with his girlfriend, and then into the Army, living into that truth, “a child is a person who passes through your life on the way to becoming an adult.”
Years.
Dianne. Nicholas. Patty.
Jody. Joe.
That’s my boy.
T+ in +Time