I remember certain features of the night you were born with complete clarity. I know the view our hospital window faced; I remember we went to get ice cream earlier in the day; I remember walking with Mom in the long hallway during the long labor; I remember our doctor checking and going home to sleep and come back later. This was all aligned with what we’d come to know about you throughout your life: We’d wait a little longer for your birthday, a little longer for you to emerge, and a little longer for you to walk. And then so very many times there was a reveal of what was waiting covertly behind a curtain, there all along but unknown to us. Storytelling upon a stage, a clarinet solo unannounced during a concert, a graduation speech—all of these came out of a depth we knew was there and, yet, was always surprise and revelation. And you take these things in stride, literally, from your first steps only after Mom was talking to the pediatric specialist on the phone to a long backpacking trip when our exclamation about your steady pace was met with your nonchalant response and strategy: “I just follow Dad.”
But on that night you entered this imperfect world, the great revelation was your presence on the exam table. You were new to the light and new to the world—or so we’d have thought until you stared through me with concerted focus from clear, steady, pupils. They tell us that infants don’t know what they’re looking at, that they aren’t really looking at you. But this wasn’t so much the looking as the knowing. You knew. Or you knew enough to be skeptical of me, the surrounds, the world that had just taken you in. “Oh, so I’m here now?” you seemed to say. You came into this world knowingly wary and careful, resolved and determined. I almost handed you the keys to drive us home.
And that’s how it’s been ever since. Except more so.
I’ve been trying to write this for months now, since before your graduation. It’s been a hard year, but that’s not the reason for the delay. It’s more because I haven’t had the depth to really make sense of all that you are and all that I’ve wanted to say. I always thought that graduation, celebrations, the summer, moving away, that all of these things would be a way to highlight and celebrate you and to make sure you had a sense of self; and in the process I figured that the words I’ve been looking for would find their buoyancy and rise to the surface. But this isn’t as simple as physics; I want so much to get this right.
From that first moment, lying there in the tray like an alien specimen, those wide open blue eyes looking into me with this sense of presence and even history here. You’ve taken it in stride, sometimes accompanied by a slow blink and deep sigh. Then you move on and get to work. The Mary Oliver poem you love encapsulates this, encapsulates you:
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
And yet I know it doesn’t always feel like that. Especially this year, these last couple of months, things aren’t straightforward. It doesn’t feel like we know what we’re doing, any of us. For this I’m really really sorry. I wish it weren’t this way. I wish it were if not perfect, at least knowable.
What I have to remind myself of continually is that I know everything will continue to change. I know all is temporary. I know that at some point, in a historical sense that won’t seem so substantial, we’ll get to a place when we’ll see this as past and that such a past will be memorable, sure, but also a moment we emerge from. We’ll be able to look back. Some of our Pandemia reality has fallen short, if not pulled the footing right out from underneath us; but, some of it’s been surprisingly better than I ever could have imagined. I’m now excited for you to look back at this precious (bizarre, historic, unimaginable) time, extract what you have from it, stare through it with your knowing eyes, and say “it’s fine,” as you do.
There in the hospital, what I only now appreciate was that you weren’t just looking at me skeptically, wisely, but looking out beyond me. It wasn’t just your father you knew to be aware and critical of, but the rest of this planet. And here you are, wise to the world with clarity beyond your years. You see injustice and idiocy and you paint over it with a new kindness and empathy and, most important, action. You see things and people clearly for what they are, and so much of it I had no understanding of myself when I was 18, or even 30, or even yesterday. And even now I look at you for example, all the time.
As I was saying, I started writing this months ago, just before your high school graduation, and then more after the ceremony when you walked through an empty gym with a cap and gown and mask and gave a speech about celebrating one another that gave me hope. And then I’d keep coming back to this as you were packing up and on your way out to start another phase. And I never had it right, and I still don’t; but now I’ve realized that I never will. And, it’s fine.
You will understand. There are pieces of me that you get that perhaps no one else could. Maybe it’s genetics or a soul you’ve made me aware of or just simple understanding of each other. You know the merits to be by myself and quiet, even folded up away from the world as a way to internalize ideas, letting them turn and twist and braid in my head. But also we know packing feelings inside where they can be buried is treacherous, letting their weight pull us down. But, but, we also let sparks of joy settle down to dance inside until they percolate to the top. So I look to you to react to a joke or pun, even if it’s a moan because there’s the chance that it could be a geyser of laughing that might spurt out immediately, and intermittently after. I know that feeling and love to see it shared in you, just as much as I relate to the quiet internal attentiveness that might seem externally withdrawn.
This is what I’ve come to as I’m always trying to get it right. It’s not simply that you’re the person who once lay on that tray and stared back at me already knowing what you were up against. It’s that you embrace all of that, sometimes anxiously but always with firm footing, and you move forward. Even as your father, the one who is supposed to know stuff, I recognize I’m just here to teach you to drive or maybe explain fractions; but otherwise you’re the one who opens up the world to me.
And I’m so excited that in a few days you’ll be home again, and I suspect that even as you continue to become and evolve into your own, the eyes and the soul will be the same; knowing, and knowing more. I guess the truth is that from Day 1, I’ve wanted to be like you, more aware and centered and resolved. Make a face, buckle down, move on, like the waves on the shore. I could say I’m proud to be your father but that doesn’t quite encapsulate it. I’m grateful to my core that you’re here, that I live alongside you; that the world gets to have you in it, aware and acting and more wise all the time. This is the world I want to live in, the one with you in it, leading the way. I’ll follow right behind.
