We got a letter from Albertville Primary (and his teacher, the mysteriously named “New Hire”) informing us that he will have be in the morning half-day group.
“Trevvy,” said Jodi, “that means you’ll get to ride to school with Brendan and Gabe and Emma!”
Trevor looked concerned and a little sad. “But Mom,” he said. “I like to get up in real morning.”
“What do you mean by real morning?” asked Jodi.
You know,” he said. “Like, when the sun’s already up!”
I summoned Gabe to the top of the stairs yesterday morning in order to wish him a happy birthday before I left for work. He is now nine and is not a morning person, nor does he happily submit to parental scrutiny, discipline, or full frontal affection. So he ascends the stairs with a look of vague trepidation.
I sit on the edge of the coffee table and beckon with both hands. He comes a step closer, then two, then stops. I smile and beckon again. He takes a step, the anxiousness now solidifying in his face.
“Gabe, come here!” I laugh, lean forward, grip his skinny body on either side, right at the ticklish spot below the ribs, so he nearly crumbles to the floor, helplessly squirming. I hug him close and say, “Happy Birthday, son!” He mumbles a sheepish thanks, and on my back I feel the flutter of his hands, patting my back quickly to ward off awkwardness.
Gabe is not generally a head-on hugger. He prefers to sidle under an arm and slip his own around your waist, or back himself into a soft lap and warm embrace. A kiss is an instantly blush-worthy event, and a kiss in the generally vicinity of the lips (cheek, nose, etc.) will turn him inside-out with embarrassment. He simply isn’t an aggressive type, in anger, affection, or otherwise.
But something is changing in Gabe. It started this spring, when we traveled to Michigan to see my cousin Al before he deployed to Iraq. Brendan and a group of Thorp cousins we seldom get to see decided to play baseball, and Gabe, who plays soccer in the spring and rarely puts on a mitt, decided to play, too. Not only that, but to pitch.
After only 10 minutes or so of play, my cousin Mel tossed a pitch back to Gabe, and it sailed just above his mitt and smacked him solidly in the forehead. Gabe fell to the lawn holding his head, his eye welling with tears. I went to him, but as I approached, he got to his feet, hissing air in and out through his teeth, still holding his forehead, walking in rough circles near where he had fallen.
“Are you okay?” I asked. He nodded, eyes wet, jaw set.
“You wanna sit out a minute?”
He shook his head, picked up the ball, and returned to the scuff in the grass from which he had been pitching.
I quietly expressed my amazement to my sister. This was not like Gabriel.
A short while later, he took another baseball to the forehead, this one off a bat, I think. Oh no! I thought, running back out to him. His eyes were glassy again, but he rubbed his head with the heel of his hand and smiled. I moved his hand. You could see the stitches from the baseball imprinted in deep red on his skin. I told him so, and his eyes flashed panic, but only for a second. He went back to pitching.
He talked about both injuries throughout the day, both as points of pride and of sympathy, but never complained and never quit playing.
Fast forward to our trip to South Dakota over the Fourth of July. Gabe has an inexplicable affection for a large goat that perennially appears in the Piedmont (SD) Fourth of July Parade and could not wait to see Jacob this summer. Jodi took him to Jacob’s keeper’s farm a day or so early to visit, and Gabe was invited to march in the parade with the family and the goat.
This should have been a no-brainer, except that Gabe isn’t the most social of our children, especially around people he doesn’t know well, and wouldn’t offer any immediate response about whether he intended to do it.
Ultimately he agreed to do walk with them, and Jodi took him over before the parade to get dressed and ready. He would have to line up with the family, of course, so for the next couple hours he would be without familiar faces, except, of course, Jacob’s.
The results of the parade you can see in the photo above — a joy-filled kid and an alter-ego that still makes frequent appearances at our house: Mr. Patriotic. But the change seems to have gone deeper. Immediately following the parade, Gabe was verbally sparring with his siblings and cousins, keeping pace with their jabs and meeting them with wit and outright hilarity. He was more outspoken about his opinions. And at Brendan’s baseball picnic last weekend, he played pickup baseball with Bren’s team, mostly older boys and strangers, and although he started swimming lessons this year as though last year’s lessons had never happened, he ran into the water at the lake and played and splashed with Bren and his teammates until finally I had to (quietly) remind him that he doesn’t really swim.
How does one do that: admire and encourage the newfound confidence of his son and still protect him from the dunking natures of boys twice his size who don’t know that three months ago, he would barely jump into the water?
I went to soccer practice with him last night. He took a hard-kicked ball right between the eyes; his head jerked backward, and the coach’s wife seated next to me gasped. The coach asked several times if Gabe was okay. He shook his head to clear out the stars, laughed, and said yes.
Then he looked at his coach, smiled wryly, and said, “I got hit in the face … on my BIRTHDAY!” And he laughed again.
Happy birthday, Gabe — we are so proud of you!
Pictured above: Not the fabled game-winner chronicled below, but representative. Get ’em, Bren!
Those who know me best know that I’m an emotional sort, so it will come as no surprise to them that I choked up at Bren’s baseball game last Thursday. His team was playing for a chance at the consolation finals (a shot at third place in the league), and fell behind by seven or eight runs in the first inning. They kept pace after that with scrappy play, including a five-run inning that started on the third strike of the third out, when the opposing catcher lost his handle on the pitch and Bren’s teammate scampered to first.
But they were still down by eight when they came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth and final inning. Slowly, steadily, they chipped away — now a hit, now a walk, now stealing home on a wild pitch — so when Brendan came up to bat, the score was tied with two outs and the winning run on third.
Brendan had a hit earlier in the game, and his coach had mentioned he had a great round of batting practice before the game. Even so, my heart was in my throat. Those who know me best also know that I was a poor athlete, and a particularly ungifted hitter in three short years of baseball. I had not wanted to bat in such situations, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it for him.
The first pitch sailed high over his head and into the backstop; the catcher scrambled, and the third-base coach sagely held the runner against the boy’s better judgment. The second pitch slipped neatly down the middle and into the catcher’s glove as Brendan watched it pass: STRIKE!
Oh no! I thought. That was the one! The dad next to me said, “Now you’ve seen it, Brendan.” I followed with a cheerful, “Alright now, Bren — be ready up there!”
I didn’t feel cheerful.
Maybe there was another pitch or two in there somewhere; maybe not. The next pitch I actually remember met the bat with a metallic PING! and flew high into the air. Bren started toward first with all his father’s speed, watching the ball as it fell down, down. (Just run! my heart shrieked.) The runner at third tagged up and headed home.
There was a relatively narrow expanse of grass between the infielders and the out, and Bren’s towering fly ball fell exactly there, behind the backpedaling shortstop, and in front of the racing left- and center-fielders. When it bounced on the grass, Bren grinned, spread his arms wide like wings, and stomped firmly on first base as his teammate crossed the plate — the walkoff RBI; the winning run. His teammates mobbed him, shouting their joy. I grinned, laughed, cried.
We are friends with the family of the opposing team’s catcher, and it must’ve been a heartbreaking loss. But for Brendan, it was the pinnacle of a season. it earned him the game ball, and when his team circled up and put their hands together in the center, the cheer was, “1, 2, 3, BRENDAN!”
He works hard at being a good ballplayer, and he has accomplished so much that I never did. They won their game Saturday, as well, to earn third-place trophies all around. Congratulations, Bren and team, for a great season!
Last night I walked into the guest bedroom at the Venjohns to see three of our four kids getting ready for bed. Emma and Gabe were searching for toothbrushes when Trevor put his thumbs in his waistband and said, “Well, I’m taking my pants off in 10 – 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 …” The others found scrambled for the door as he accelerated the count: “5,4,3,2 …” As he said “1” the door clicked shut. Trevor said “Zero” in a high-pitch “uh-oh!” of a voice, then dropped his pants and whispered, “Ah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
Blogger’s Note: This is a more accurate account of the day the neighbor’s wolf-dog came to visit Boomer and me — much fresher than this one. It originally ran as a column in The Pioneer daily newspaper on Dec. 30, 1997.
It’s been one of those days.
It hasn’t really — “one of those days” implies I’ve had a day like this before, and with enough regularity to refer to it as commonplace, with a cliche.
This day has been like no other in my life.
I rolled in from work at about 1 a.m. Monday morning, a full hour later than one should if Monday’s paper goes together without a hitch. I can’t say just what the problem was Sunday night — computers crash; no one can say just why.
I stumbled through the house without turning on the lights, so as not to disturb our sleeping guests; went to the fridge and pulled out my lunch, which I had forgotten to bring to work, and sat down on the bed beside Jodi to eat.
The clock read 1:30 or so when two shepherd-looking puppies one house to the west began yipping like a pack of coyotes. I hollered once out the back door, and they stopped — briefly. About quarter to two, just after I’d finished eating and gotten comfortable, they started in again; I found myself standing in the snow in shorts and a t-shirt yelling into the black: “Shaddap!”
They did so.
Brendan woke up screaming sometime around three; he was wet through and hungry. The blanket was soaked, his bed was soaked — Jodi asked me to bring him in wet so she could feed him immediately, again to avoid disturbing our guests’ slumber.
Brendan would have none of it — he’s quite particular, our son — so we changed him, head to toe. Jodi fed him, then, and I stripped the bed, tripped down to the basement to gather clean bedding from the dryer, and remade the crib.
Brendan fell asleep beside his mother.
He woke again with the sun, hungry, and Jodi fed him. Her mother — bless her heart — got up and took him from Jodi so we could both get some sleep. I came to around 9:45, remembering my folks were expecting us all for lunch and that I had a dog to feed and a column to write before I could begin paginating Tuesday’s news. I got up.
I turned Boomer loose when I went out to feed him, and as I bent to scoop ice from his water dish, I heard snarling behind me. I turned to find Boomer standing between me and a wolf-dog (more wolf than dog) from two trailers to the east. I was scared, as one might be when one finds a wolf behind him, snarling at his dog. I stepped out of the kennel (Fool!) and told Boomer to kennel up; the wolf loped off toward his trailer, watching me over his shoulder.
I went inside to call my neighbor, the wolf’s master, to let him know his dog was loose and thus attempt to stay on good terms. No listing, and no answer at his mom’s house. Jodi’s dad told me the wolf had come at a run while I was bent over, not looking — I reluctantly called animal control to talk with the owner and possibly catch the wolf.
Jodi and her family left for my parents’ house, and I waited for animal control. I finally left for my parents’, only to get stuck a short way from my house.
I arrived at Mom and Dad’s just in time to eat and head to work for the evening. Jodi’s sister leaves tomorrow morning; it’ll be months before we see her again.
Ah, well — tomorrow is another day, and time to try again.
Tomorrow is another day, and Thursday is another year — both tailor-made for fresh starts and new beginnings. Who knows what either holds? Who knew what Monday would bring, or the day before or this waning year?
I have only to look at yesterday and this past year to witness new beginnings — a new state, new jobs, a new house, a new baby.
The job that keeps me away at night allows me to write this column and pay for our house — who knew yesterday that I’d have a column and we’d have a house? The house that keeps me busy with neighbors, shepherd puppies and wolf-dogs keeps our family and guests warm and secure, and the son that keeps us awake at night has brought more joy than the sweetest dreams. Would I trade him and the house away to rid myself of sleepless nights and fear of wolves? Not on your life.
Tomorrow is another day — who knows what may come?
Who knew a wolf might interrupt dinner?
Archangel Stomp 