James

November 10, 1985.  It was my mother's birthday.  It was also the day of my first-born's baptism.  I remember it as an unusually balmy day for mid-November.  Early in the morning, I got a phone call from my best friend, whose presence at the ceremony I was expecting.  I can't make it, she said.  James is going to be born today.  And so he was.

Sweet Baby James, whose mother loved him to the moon and back.  Mischievous, energetic James, who raced through his childhood, spirited and curious.  Loving, affectionate James, who navigated the ruins of divorce and a broken home.  Tormented, confused James, who could not possibly understand why Death took his mother from him when he was 14 years old.

James came to visit today, specifically to retrieve the oak rocking chair that his mother gave me years ago.  It was the rocker in which she rocked James and his sister, and now that his sister has her own baby, I wanted her to have the chair.  It took us less than five minutes to load the chair in the car, and then we sat down on the back deck with a couple of beers to catch up.

An awful lot of emotion was packed into the hour and a half that we chatted.  I am no stranger to the pain that is visited upon children who lose a parent, as my own children have suffered the pain of losing their father when they were too young to understand what was happening.  But whereas my children have grown up with stories about their father, James, due to circumstances he was not responsible for, experienced a great void of stories about his mother.  He looks to me to fill that void.

And I offer him as much as I can recall.  I am aware that I am telling him stories I have told him before.  I will tell them again.  And that is okay; he likes hearing them again.  I just wish I had more stories, different stories, new stories.

Don't we all?

Today, I am in love with my best friend's son, the child she left behind, who has grown into a man of whom she would be proud.  Pete used to tell me (based on the psychology classes that he took) that everything you are going to do for your child, you will have done by the time the child is five.  Of course, that doesn't mean that you drop the ball when the child turns six.  But the groundwork, the values and the behaviors, are pretty much established by age five.  JoAnn did a good job.  James is a good man.  And he has a lot of love to give.