August 19th

Too fried yesterday to write and really I still am but I thought it worth mentioning that August 19th was a significant date this year for a few reasons.

Most importantly it was the day we celebrated The Kid’s 4th birthday. We went a little nuts and bought too much stuff for the number of people who ended up attending but it wasn’t that much and we all had a blast. A Bouncy-House goes a long way to keeping everyone happy. They should start shipping them to trouble spots all over the world along with food and porn.

I digress…

So four years ago, give or take, The Wife and I stayed up into the early hours of the morning and focused on completing the assignment we’d begun nine months earlier. It took a while and modern medicine made it a lot easier and less fatal than it might have been a few decades before. I remember seeing the top of The Kid’s head for the first time and then when the rest of him followed saying a few things about the sacredness of poop. The Medicine Folk passed him along like an efficient assembly line til he ended up mostly clean but for some blood and lying beneath a heat lamp like the loneliest cafeteria food you ever saw.

I asked if I could approach him and the woman in scrubs said “Oh yeah, he’s yours now.”

While they were seeing to The Wife I crossed the delivery room with my archaic film camera and the last wisps of my old life blowing away and met the person I loved more than I will ever love anyone else. He was wriggling and whimpering as any sane person would after having endured such a drastic change of circumstance. I looked at him and maybe said something like “hey” or his name. I reached out and touched his chest with the fingertips of my left hand and he stopped whimpering and we just looked at each other for a bit. I’m told that infants can’t visually process any of the images their eyes and brains receive for a while after they’re born. If this is true they are effectively blind. This kid could have fooled me because we were connected then as powerfully as he had just been disconnected from his mom and it seemed like those dark little eyes were being put to use. I hoped they worked better than mine.

Somewhere in there his nose got vacuumed, his heel got pricked, and he got wrapped up professionally like a burrito. This seemed to suit him fine and he passed out in his mother’s arms.

Mom and Kid got taken away to rest and I was advised to go home and do whatever I thought appropriate. I was fine, my emotional circuits properly melted until NPR decided it would be the perfect time to play an old duet of George Harrison and Paul Simon singing “Here Comes the Sun” and I “Aaahhhed!” and nearly had to pull over.

I alerted the world with the help of a machine that today would fit on your hip and let the love and good wishes ping and chime while I found my way to bed.

George Harrison and Paul Simon hummed in my head with the woman in scrubs repeating, “Oh yeah, he’s yours now.”

But even more so, four years later, I am his.

Also 30 years ago on August 19th Groucho Marx died (three days after Elvis) and both Christian Slater and Matthew Perry turned eight.

Five months ago on the 19th (March 19th for you who hate the counting) I resigned from “Big News” the show I’d done since January 2003.

I was going to write more about Groucho and Big News contrasting death and life in a comic context, but I think I’ll do that another time.

For money!