Tim's English Paper

Tim's paper was about our family and I liked it so I thought I'd share it with you guys.

Behind our backyard we had another, wilder yard.  Maybe one-twelfth of an acre, it was bordered from the short-cropped lawn of our backyard and the neighbor’s miniature apple orchard by two high fences.  Another side was given over to a tall and sprawling raspberry bramble, gloriously productive in neglect, and the mouth of the way-back yard, or just the “way-back”, was open to a dirt-road alley.  In those summers between when I learned to walk and when I learned push a mower, the way-back was a thigh-high jungle of golden grass, bent over in flower, dressed up by  constellations of pink thistleheads.  Any step into the grass might result in a scrape from a spiny thistle-stem, and a release of the milky stuff inside.  What strange stuff, I thought, ran through the veins of plants.  I learned to eat raspberries there, which requires no skill when plucking greedily from a supermarket package, but rewards the young forager with a tummy-ache if he doesn’t learn to slow his hand, and slip loose only the berries that are ready to fall.  I got bee stings back there, and mosquito bites, and skinned knees and shoes full of stones and socks full of burrs--I’m not complaining, I’m bragging here.

Catching grasshoppers was the real attraction of the wayback.  It provided the real lessons.  I learned to crouch in wait, following a big brown hopper in silence as he flitted from grass stem to grass stem, to pick my moment and pounce with both hands cupped.  I remember the powerful legs kicking my soft palm, the head popping again and again against the opposite hand.  I remember the mad fluttering of wings, and it being so hard to keep my paws closed against the mad will to life beating against them.  There is no possible way I spent as many hours back there as I recall.  There were visits to friend’s houses, lots and lots of t.v., and tee-ball.  Those memories have darkened, the hunt has grown brighter.  I learned back then that grasshoppers (and lady beetles, moths, centipedes) don’t survive well in glass jars, furnished they may be with a leaf and a stick.  They struggle fiercely against the sides.  Their legs fall off.  They spill their blood.

My son comes out fine in this story.  It seems important to mention that first.  I would not tell this story otherwise.  He was born in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, at forty-two weeks.  My wife, the star of our family, labored for forty-eight hours before assenting to a c-section.  It was abruptly apparent why he hadn’t come out the usual way.  

“Oh my god!” exclaimed the air-head doctor as she got her first look at my boy, “Oh my GOD!”  (If you ever want to get my dander up, exclaim “Oh my god!” while you’re delivering one of my children.  Be sure not to make it clear what you’re exclaiming about.  Then repeat.)  “Oh my god, that is a BIG baby!”    

“Somebody call the Seahawks,” said the nurse.  

Henry weighed twelve pounds and one ounce.  When the doctor finally secured him from my wife’s body I saw he was the color of a pomegranate, with a thick head of hair and massive, meaty arms and legs flailing against the lights of the new world.  He screamed and punched and kicked, his nostrils flared.  

“What he does look like?” asked my anesthetized wife from the gurney.

“He’s perfect,” I said.  “And hairy.”

The nurses had him on a table under a hot light.  Before I could even touch him they whisked him out of sight.

“He’s having trouble breathing,” they said.

They took Henry to a restricted room in the center of the delivery unit.  From behind a window we watched Henry’s arms and legs struggle against the air being blown down into his face by a glass tube.  This extra fresh air would make sure he got enough oxygen to... what?  To live?  To not get brain damage?  I didn’t think to ask.  

“Enough,” they said.  Enough is good, I thought.  

I’d never wanted to touch anyone so badly in all my life.  Every monkey instinct told me to storm into that room, snatch up my boy and clutch him to myself, then deliver him to my wife, tearful and brave, and say “Here, he belongs in your arms.”  My fear of doing wrong, of accidently further wounding my poor man, stepped in where my common sense had fled me.  

It was decided that Henry would be sent to a more-equipped hospital in downtown Seattle, but my wife, who had lost blood during the surgery, would remain at the branch hospital in Ballard.  Two E.M.T.’s dressed to do cleanup at Fukushima placed Henry in a clear plastic box, with dials and tubes bolted to the sides, then loaded him into an ambulance and left.  I held the grips of my wife’s wheelchair with white knuckles as I looked down into her eyes.  We lived that worst moment of our lives, together.  Then I had to go.

I went into the bathroom before I left the hospital.  I screamed in there, and cried, and then I washed my hands and face.  You have to calm down, I told myself.  You have to drive to the hospital and not die.  I closed my eyes, and I thought of the way-back.  I could say that I often returned to the way-back in times of strife, but I’m embarrassed to admit how little strife I’d encountered in my first twenty-eight years.  I imagined Henry back there, in the weeds, up to his own scraped knees in brown grass, his fat fingers stained with grasshopper juice.  It’s going to happen, I thought.  I pictured him eating raspberries, sunburnt arms, marked by thistles and raspberry thorns.  One day it will happen for him.

I followed a young nurse through heavy double doors at the downtown hospital.  She made me wash my hands to the elbows, then lead me into the Newborn Intensive Care Unit and further to Henry’s bed.  His skin had mellowed to a gummy pink, his fat little body parts remained in constant motion as he lay on his back under the air machine, quietly fussing with his eyes closed.  His nostrils flared when he breathed, the telltale sign, I learned, of respiratory infection.  In addition to the glass tube blowing fresh air into his face, his arm was wrapped up in gauze and splinted from elbow to wrist, packaged to house a baby I.V., pumping antibiotics.  “Hellboy,” I thought.  “He has a Hellboy arm.”

I was afraid to hold him that first night.  I wanted to leave him under his oxygen machine.  For all I knew it was a lifeline.  “Don’t rub his shoulder like that,” the nurse told me.  “You’re scaring him.”

People often complain that life is unfair.  I’d always found this complaint ridiculous.  Of course life is unfair, I thought.  Maybe we should leave the complaining to the folks who, on any given day, are starving to death.  I’d had ten months to think about what it meant to become a father, and I had felt that I’d considered the question, but now I knew that I didn’t know a damned thing.  I’d been a father for a few hours, and now it seemed I might cease to be one in a few more hours, or days, or minutes.  Being a father meant exchanging the lead role in The Story of Me, for a supporting role in The Story of Henry.  But what happens if that story ends before I do?  There were babies in that unit who were born months premature.  They lived in plastic boxes, and spent their days alone, their parents long since having returned to work.  Life wasn’t unfair, life was monstrous.  

I stood next to him, watched him, for an hour, so afraid for his future, unsure what to do.  When I started to fall asleep standing up the nurse made me go away, to a little hotel room down the hall.  I can never thank Bill Gates enough: his dough built the room.  I slept there those nights.

In the room I found a copy of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the next morning at five I was back in Henry’s room, reading to him the adventures of foolish Ichabod Crane.  I found that I could hold him in my left arm, the air blower being less essential than I’d assumed, and hold a book in my right hand.  Finally feeling him close to me, I discovered that though he was big for a baby, he was smaller and lighter than any baby I’d ever held.  He looked up at me with his crinkled old-man face, his big eyes, and gurgled his spit in a way that I took to indicate happiness, or at least peacefulness.  In that way I read to him.  When the nurse kicked me out that night we were most of the way through Call of the Wild.  We finished it the next morning, then a kind older nurse fixed up the room so that no one could see in, and Henry and I napped together (technically against the rules).  

“It’s so nice to have a real baby in here for a change,” she said.  This is luck, I realized.  Henry’s nostrils barely flared anymore, thanks to his Hellboy arm and the antibiotics.  Someone brought me breast milk every day, pumped by his momma, for me to feed him. After three days--halfway through Little House on the Prairie--Henry was moved out of the N.I.C.U. and into his first apartment.  It was a family-room in the hospital where my wife, rejoining us finally, and I stayed with our increasingly healthy (though borderline collicky) baby for seven more days, until the course of drugs was complete and we could all go home together.
Henry is two years old now. He’s progressed from an infant to a miniature, grunting cave-boy, to a chattering, surefooted hiker.  Everyday we walk home from the school where I study biology and calculus, and he practices making friends and sharing toys in the daycare.  Though we live in the city, we come to an acre of second-growth forest along Thornton Creek on our way home.  I take him out of his stroller and we wander down the trail, often doubling back, often taking side-roads under the redcedars.  He tells me stories here.  He is the hero in these tales.  

“Dad, oh no!” he says, “I see a lion over there.”  A lion?  “We got to catch him.”  We track the lion, pausing to munch on the baby-blue currants, sweet and mealy, pausing to observe the cross spiders, to disturb gently their webs so we can watch them scamper from the center out to leafy cover at the margins, pausing so much that we never do catch the lion.