Hi, Mom and Dad, it’s a boy! Just like I told everyone he was going to be (although, no, there was no ultrasound done; it just had felt like this one was definitely a boy, and so he was.)
“You missed my birthday,” growled Dad good-naturedly.
I told him that well, the doctor I wanted wasn’t on call the day before, and I wasn’t going to have my baby till he was going to be the one to deliver him. End of story. Sorry about that.
Well, in that case, he guessed I was forgiven. And Dad got a good laugh out of it, knowing that yes, I would indeed have gone out of labor if I hadn’t gotten the doctor I wanted. I’d inherited Dad’s stubborn streak.
All the stories I could mercilessly tell on this 6’9″ little boy of mine. The fingers dipped in the oil floating at the top of the natural peanut butter that he then ran down the newly-painted wall, at age two, of the house we were trying to put on the market. We had to sand it down before we could paint it again. Of the time he…
Well, let’s just say he was a normal, active little boy. He filled all the lines on the massive x-ray chart at the clinic and they had to start a new page. He is someone who I had to explain to a pediatrician (not his regular one, who knew him) as, this one doesn’t feel pain much, and if he *does* complain of pain, something’s wrong–listen up.
As a kid, he got hit by a car on his bike (just like his dear old Mom did at age nine) and ignored it and went to go play in his soccer game anyway and thought he could get away with not telling anyone–he didn’t want to let his teammates down. He got bitten by a gopher he was trying to pick up to protect it from the kids on the playground who were stomping on its mounds. Got a heart of gold, that kid does; we were assured that gophers don’t carry rabies and that the gopher had definitely been provoked, even if not by him.
He volunteered for a mission for the Mormon Church, being willing to go into the chaos that was Haiti, studying Haitian Creole, and then being reassigned to southern Florida when all Americans were ordered out of that country for safety’s sake shortly before he was to arrive.
Thus he was in southern Florida during all those hurricanes a few years back; he cooked and served hot meals for the Red Cross shelter, and lived for a time near Barbara Walker’s home. (She and I swapped a few hurricane stories on the phone once.)
He had placed sixth for fluency in French for non-native speakers for all of northern California in high school; Haitian Creole, the old slaves’ French, was easy for him to pick up. And thus, in one of those Red Cross shelters, he was able to translate for a woman with a severe heart situation to the paramedics, writing down in English what she was telling him. He was told he’d saved her life.  A news crew came in, looking for a human interest story in the storm, and people pointed him out. But there were hundreds of salisbury steaks needing cooking and people who were hungry. When he later emailed me the link to the newspaper story, he added, Mom, your, um, hero son–they got in my way! I had work to do!
And he told me that if he never accomplished anything else during his two-year stint, he now knew why he had to learn that language and receive that calling: to be able to be there in that place in that moment when that woman so needed him.
He later picked the best daughter-in-law I could ever have hoped for, and thank goodness she picked him too. He loves her dearly for now and forever. Happy birthday, Richard!
(I’ve been corrected–there were no paramedics at first because nobody knew the woman needed one. She’d simply given up. Richard got asked, since he could speak her language, to go ask her if she needed anything. Uh, yes. She did.)