22 January 2003

Anniversaries

It is 18 degrees this morning morning, cold in a way that only a normally temperate climate can deliver. Penetrating. The 71st annual convocation of the American Conference of Mayors is happening today. They are meeting somewhere, didn't catch where, but I expect it is someplace warm. Looking back up the centuries, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron and Robert E. Howard were all born on this day. It would be the 97th birthday for the creator of Conan the Barbarian, who were he real, would probably recognize the landscape of today's world.

There will be fifty thousand people on the national Mall for another anniversary. The President is out of town, wants to talk about the economy, but it is a day of rememberance.

It was forty years ago today that Charles DeGaul and Conrad Adenauer signed the Elysee treaty of unity and friendship. To put an end finally to the century of bloodshed that wiped out the empires and left the Yankees sitting on top of the wreckage of Europe. The French and the Germans wanted Europe someday to be able to stand up to the Americans, and the signing was really the beginning of the grand European Union. The entire Bundestag is expected at Versailles for the celebration, if you can imagine, and delicately, there will be no parades under the Arc de Triumph.

It is thirty years today that a woman's right to choose was enshrined in the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. The Justices found an intrinsic Right to Privacy somewhere in the Constitution, maybe written on the back in pencil somewhere, and voila! there it was. I know better than to say anything more. Depending on who you talk to, it is either murder or state intrusion into your very body. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed but I know better than to go any further than to observe the anniversary. Until I bear children it is not my place to have an opinion.

It is eighteen years ago that my second son was born. It will actually be this evening. He arrived during an unscheduled Ceasarean delivery on a soft Hawaiian night, much travail, though the procedure went smoothly enough. The Doctor at The Queens Medical Center in Honolulu looked up shortly before Midnight and asked if we wanted both our sons to have the same birthday. We said no, and asked him to move expeditiously so that each boy would have something that was theirs alone, not something to share. The meningitis that nearly killed him infected him the next day, his first in the wide world. He failed to thrive, though they gave him a course of drugs that almost beat it back. They left enough of the bacteria in his tiny frame so it could surge and grow and penetrate the membranes of his brain after he came home.

You wouldn't know it to look at him now. He is well over six foot now, handsome and ironic and popular. Preoccupied with the festival of his senior year in high school. At the time though, the intensive care staff called him the Miracle Baby because they had given up, told us he was dead. I was in the pre-natal intensive care and watched him go into seizure five times, his heart being re-started with tiny shock paddles. They told us to leave, go away, nothing to be done. When the Doctor called the next morning he told me that the balance had shifted, and I looked out the lanai at the glistening water of Pearl Harbor and asked him how the balance can change from death to life.

He did not have a good answer for me, except to say that my son refused to leave. It had been entirely his decision. The Doctor also added, ominously, that his living was going to come with a price, and that we had to be ready for some challenges.

But those anniveraries are in the weeks ahead, and I do not mark them on the calendar. The damage was not as bad as they predicted, and the developmental milestones of infancy and childhood were all met. Today he can vote, if he was interested, and he must register for a Draft that no longer exists in order to qualify for his college loans. He is, to borrow a phrase from another people of The Book, a man today.

Charles Wrangle of the House is on a Quixotic quest to re-institute universal conscription to ensure that the wealthy understand that their children can also be called to war over vital national interests. My son will enroll in the data base because it is the law. He is playing point guard in his basketball league tonight, and I will be there to watch him play, gangly and graceful all at once. Indomitable, in his way.

A miracle.