protector

Have I told you how we discovered that your name means “protector”? Have I told you of the woman who gave your mother the sampler with the emblematic tree ? Have I told you of the trees at Pleasant Lake? Have I told you everything? This too the cry of mortality and fatherhood: have I told you all I could, my son? Have I told you how much I love you, or more importantly how your love forms me?

(Have I told you how like any son as a young man I delighted in the brash blasphemy of Hemingway’s prayer: “Our Nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name...” Your name seems to me now the closure which overturns the prayer to the void; you are the one son, a man.)

I know I have told you (though never tire of telling) how I recall the lights of the small city twinkling outside the hospital window as dawn came that May morning, how clearly I can see the dance of intelligence, the joy in your eyes, not more than three hours into the light, how I can feel the muscled hydraulic pump of your eager legs (even then! wanting to move, to get on with life, and never looking back from it) against my lap. I know I have told you how I cried for joy when, exhausted, I returned home to a sunny bedroom and blossoms all around on South Jackson Road, hugging the dog, Ezra, for want of anyone else to share such joy, and him, dumb thing, red furred, drooling, but with wise dark eyes, somehow allowing my eccentricity, in my arms in the empty bed.