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Today I will celebrate life, just as I did yesterday, on the birthday of our first grandchild who sure had a hard beginning: He was so sleepy in his newborn weeks we had to feed him with an eye dropper, urging the milk into his mouth in the tiniest increments.
It was the drug prescribed by the doctors that made him this way, though it wasn’t very long before his two mothers insisted the dosage be cut in half and then eliminated, at which point he woke and fattened up almost overnight, swelling like biscuits in the oven with yeasty life.
And yesterday he turned eight. We went to his house last night for a feast of his favorite meal: cheese pizza, Doritos, and purple Gatorade – along with ice cream and cake of course.
His little brother was present and I guess you could say his baby sister was too though she’s not yet born; she’s in her cocoon still and not due to break out for another week or so. Yet she must have heard us. She must know everyone’s voice by now, especially this birthday boy Eddie, and his brother David, and his two moms.
He’s had a lovely childhood so far, that much I know, what with playing in the snow, and digging up the yard up worse than a gopher, and setting up lemonade stands and drum sets in the driveway.
Eddie on the right with his little brother David
One time his parents came home from to find that he had talked the babysitter into letting him take the contents of an entire closet out into the driveway improvising some sort of stage set. Even today his favorite thing seems to be organizing. Taking everything apart, then putting it together in a new way: that his idea of fun.
He has a questioning mind. Once he spotted a crucifix on the wall of our bedroom, the bedroom old Dave and I share, who are his maternal grandparents.
“What’s THAT?” He exclaimed examining the limp body affixed to it.
Well, I said, that was taken from my grandfather’s coffin just before they closed it.
He just looked at me. That’s not what he meant. He meant, “What on earth kind of thing is THIS to make a sculpture out of?”
Eddie’s a Unitarian child being brought up in that clear-eyed tradition, going Sundays to a plain white church with clear panes of glass looking out at the old New England sky.
I started trying to explain what crucifix was, how you called it a crucifix if it has the image of the dying Christ on it and so on but what was I thinking?
“Why is he DEAD? He wanted to know, and “Why did they KILL him?”
I started trying to explain what a crucifix was, how you called it a crucifix if it has the image of the suffering Christ and so on, but what was I thinking talking to a child so young of driving nails through the flesh of a person everyone said was the nicest person you could ever meet. He was three years old! I was in over my head in less than 30 seconds but that’s what happens with Eddie: he asks and you answer and the next thing you know the furniture in both of your minds has moved all around once again and you’re looking at things in a whole new light.
Anyway, now he’s eight, and the geese have come back to us a full three weeks earlier than they usually do and the Paper White Narcissus that six weeks ago was a fistful of hard round knuckles in a pot is today a glory of blossom, each stem, like this child, reaching its strong young neck up to the light.
